Daniel F. Perkins

This book was the most influential book during my graduate education. Today, I still review it. The book is a seminal volume in the field of Human Development and the current approaches to the study of human development processes. The book address the philosophical and historical bases of the key conceptual issues in the field, the centrality of the nature-nurture issue, the importance of understanding the dynamics between continuity and discontinuity across the life span, the ways in which stances on the nature-nurture and continuity-discontinuity issues frame theories of human development, and on the associations among philosophy, concepts, theories, methods, and applications of developmental science.