Human secondary altriciality — the condition in which the neonate brain is roughly 40% of adult size and the majority of neural development therefore occurs ex utero across an unusually extended childhood — makes brain maturation an inherently social and ecological process, so that the developmental environment is constitutive of, rather than merely an influence upon, the resulting mind. This developmental architecture is the proposed evolutionary substrate for belief, defined here not as religiosity but as the general capacity to fuse experience with imagination into ideas, ideologies, or perceptions and commit to them so completely that they become operative reality, including a psychobiological embodiment channel in which held beliefs modulate endocrine, neural, muscular, and gut-microbiome responses. The concept belongs to evolutionary anthropology at its junction with biocultural and developmental theory, and it advances the discipline's central anti-teleological claim: cultural complexity was never an adaptive requirement selected for as such, but a downstream consequence of developmental and cognitive architecture.
Human secondary altriciality — the condition in which the neonate brain is roughly 40% of adult size and the majority of neural development therefore occurs ex utero across an unusually extended chil…