Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas
Jul 13, 2026 · 42 min · 14 segments
Children who grow up in troubled circumstances―experiencing deprivation or instability, living in a dangerous neighborhood or an abusive family―are more prone to aggression, recklessness, and sexual…
Jay, your book asks readers to rethink one of society's deepest moral intuitions, the belief that adversity simply damages people.
When did you first begin to suspect that the story was more complicated than that?
Well, many years ago, almost serendipitously, I picked up a paper on a large stack of papers that I collected to read when I might find the time, and it recast the question of What is growing up without a father due to development in a way that I had never considered? It was like going from black and white to color because it cast the question and the development of children growing up in such father absent households in evolutionary perspective.
I'm known as a theoretician and an empiricist, and I'm proud of both parts of my academic life, if you would.
I thought, this is a very interesting idea, but fundamentally, it's old wine in a new bottle, or a picture just with a new frame.
And so I said, you know, before you embrace a new way of looking at the world, at least in science, it should meet several criteria.
Second, it should make new predictions, novel predictions that other perspectives would not.
And for the first time, and really the only time in my 40-plus year career as a professor, I struggled with coming up with a hypothesis that this perspective would lead to, and other perspectives couldn't explain if it turned out to be true, as it did.
What I realized was that adversity should shape us in adaptive ways, because over the course of human history, adversity wasn't unknown, to say the least.
and so it seems unlikely that what that experience is doing is undermining people's capacity to cope and reproduce and reproduce the fundamental goal of all living things on this planet passing on genes whether we like it or not and so i predicted and it was a long shot to say the least that adversity would accelerate development in terms of making puberty occur earlier, because under conditions of risk, getting to sexual maturation would increase the chances that you could leave some offspring.
So it was really a case of challenging the perspective that intellectually fascinated me to see if it had legs, and it proved to have legs.
You know, one of my great disappointments in my academic career, quite frankly, is, and I don't say this to brag, I say this as a critique of autonomy, is much less open-minded than people might imagine.
And it's like they've been imprinted in the sense that they don't really deviate from it and stretch to it in terms of intellectual...
Jay, your book asks readers to rethink one of society's deepest moral intuitions, the belief that adversity simply damages people.
When did you first begin to suspect that the story was more complicated than that?
Well, many years ago, almost serendipitously, I picked up a paper on a large stack of papers that I collected to read when I might find the time, and it recast the question of What is growing up without a father due to development in a way that I had never considered? It was like going from black and white to color because it cast the question and the development of children growing up in such father absent households in evolutionary perspective.
I'm known as a theoretician and an empiricist, and I'm proud of both parts of my academic life, if you would.
I thought, this is a very interesting idea, but fundamentally, it's old wine in a new bottle, or a picture just with a new frame.
And so I said, you know, before you embrace a new way of looking at the world, at least in science, it should meet several criteria.
Second, it should make new predictions, novel predictions that other perspectives would not.
And for the first time, and really the only time in my 40-plus year career as a professor, I struggled with coming up with a hypothesis that this perspective would lead to, and other perspectives couldn't explain if it turned out to be true, as it did.
What I realized was that adversity should shape us in adaptive ways, because over the course of human history, adversity wasn't unknown, to say the least.
and so it seems unlikely that what that experience is doing is undermining people's capacity to cope and reproduce and reproduce the fundamental goal of all living things on this planet passing on genes whether we like it or not and so i predicted and it was a long shot to say the least that adversity would accelerate development in terms of making puberty occur earlier, because under conditions of risk, getting to sexual maturation would increase the chances that you could leave some offspring.
So it was really a case of challenging the perspective that intellectually fascinated me to see if it had legs, and it proved to have legs.
You know, one of my great disappointments in my academic career, quite frankly, is, and I don't say this to brag, I say this as a critique of autonomy, is much less open-minded than people might imagine.
And it's like they've been imprinted in the sense that they don't really deviate from it and stretch to it in terms of intellectual...
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