Acknowledgments

Writing this book is a labor of love, and after many years of prodding, digging, mending, I can finally see ideas coming together nicely, which brings good moments of happiness and some level of cognitive closure. Many colleagues and friends came to help on various occasions, who deserve mentions here. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to Bob Sternberg for writing the Foreword for this book. Bob has been influential on my career since my graduate school years, and several collaborative opportunities he graciously offered me proved to be productive and important for my professional development. As one can witness throughout this book, here and there, Bob’s influence on my thinking is visible.

Different from my other work, this book prominently features developmental research and theory by many distinguished scholars in the developmental field, to whom I would like to pay tribute. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work, not just his flow theory, but many thoughts he expressed about optimal human development, gains traction in my work, evident in this book (e.g., his less-celebrated book The Evolving Self. In the Epilogue, I use a quote from the abstract of a prospective chapter Mihaly initially planned to write on human potential for the volume Bob Sternberg and I co-edited (Reference Dai and SternbergDai & Sternberg, 2021), an effort on our part to tap into insight and wisdom of leading scholars in the field. I regretted to learn at the time that he would not be able to finish what he started, not knowing that he was seriously ill and passed away about a year later. What a loss to the field! Frances Degen Horowitz, a distinguished scholar in developmental science, was another one who had to withdraw from the book project mentioned above. But, at my request, Frances did not forget to write a blurb for the edited volume (Reference Dai and SternbergDai & Sternberg, 2021) before she passed away at the age of eighty-eight! It is sad that we were not able to save Mihaly and Frances’s precious final insight and wisdom. My hope is their intellectual legacy of combining humanistic concerns with scientific rigor will be preserved in the scientific discourse and research on human development. This book is in a way an attempt to honor their legacy.

Many esteemed colleagues helped me one way or another to shape the ideas and arguments of evolving complexity theory (ECT) since I initiated the thought of developing a systems theory of talent development about eight years ago (Reference Dai, Steenbergen-Hu and ZhouDai et al., 2015), including the late Anders Ericsson and Joan Freeman, as well as David Henry Feldman, Howard Gardner, Linda Jarvin, Todd Kettler, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Keith Sawyer, Dean Keith Simonton, Heidrun Stoeger, Rena Subotnik, Frank Worrell, and Albert Ziegler. My lifelong friend Wu Yiyi, a historian of science and Adjunct Professor of Fudan University, also lent me a helping hand when I dealt with issues related to the history of science (e.g., the Needham Puzzle). I still remember Yiyi loaned me Reference DampierDampier’s (1966) classic book on the history of science forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate student! I would also like to thank several classes of our doctoral and master’s students who attended my seminar on the gifted, talent, and creativity, which I offered several times before the pandemic. Through class conversation, they contributed to the evolution of ECT I present in this book.

Thanks are due to the State University of New York at Albany, my employer, for granting me a sabbatical leave, which enabled me to write up this book. I also thank the US Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (Basic Research Unit) for funding a research project on motivation and learning for which I served as Co-PI (with Dr. Ron Sun, who was PI). My empirical work reported in this book benefited from this grant over the past four to five years. Yukang Xue, Qi (Skyla) Sun, Hedayat Ghazali, and Lan Lan, doctoral students in our Program of Educational Psychology and Methodology, have provided valuable assistance for this book, in preparing the index, formatting figures and tables, and checking for the citation–reference match, among other time-consuming editorial work. I hope they learned something vicariously from the lengthy process of writing a scholarly book.

Last, this book is dedicated to the memory of Larry Coleman, my colleague and friend, who died of a heart attack while hiking in a mountainous area in Tennessee. I have long thought of making this book a tribute to him as a great person as well as a distinguished scholar. I am pleased to see my wish finally materialized (see the Postscript I wrote, “Remembering Larry,” at the end of the text).

Special Acknowledgements: Work reported in this book was partly supported by a grant to the author from the US Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (Grant No. W911NF-17–1–0236). The author was encouraged to freely express his opinions. Ideas presented in this book, therefore, do not necessarily represent those of the funding agency.