Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny?

I've been thinking a lot about peek-a-boo recently, because any time that Helena and I go for a walk, she places her hands over her eyes until I see what she is doing and say, "where's the baby, where's the baby?"  The game can go on for half an hour.  But this time, I've been thinking the game more with the ideas of early modern philosophy, than we the Lacanian foolishness I'd been using before.  Particularly, through René Descartes.

In the 17th and 18th Century, when science was all the rage -- because, after a couple of rough centuries, people were beginning to do it again -- philosophers put a lot of effort into framing their ideas in scientific terms.  How, for instance, to think about the soul?  Where is it?  How do you examine it scientifically.  And René Descartes proposed that the soul was in the pineal gland, in the middle of the brain, behind the eyes.

Now, the last time I wrote about peek-a-boo, I suggested that Helena is really involved in experimenting on the subjectivity of the other, and that covering her eyes is a way to block the game of intersubjective mirroring between people.  As she plays the game at one year and three months, I think something else is going on, something more... Cartesian?  Can it be that Helena is trying to hide her soul?

That sounds like a joke, but I don't mean it that way.  When we think about "ourselves", about where the essence of who we are is located, it's easy to think like Descartes.  Humans are visual beings, so it makes sense to situate ourselves where our eyes are.  It certainly makes more sense than in the feet or in a kidney... So might it be that Helena does, in fact, think that she is hiding something important when she pulls a cloth, or even just her fingers, over her eyes?

Now, the other thing that Helena does as we walk around is give names to the things in her world.  Like many babies, she uses loads of onomotopeias: "bow-wow" for a dog, "meow" for a cat, various chirps for birds and moos for cows.  Some of the earliest Greek thinkers suggested that language might have started in exactly this way... you can see traces of the idea in Plato's Phædrus, for instance. Most modern linguists dismiss the idea, but at one point, it had a lot of currency.

So, returning from a walk to the beach the the library yesterday, I shared a hypothesis with Helena, one that certainly won't withstand any serious scrutiny, but which was fun to invent.  Biologists love the phrase "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," meaning that the development of a being in the womb mimics the evolution of the species as a whole.  A fetus looks like a fish and a bird and loads of other things before it comes to look like a human being.

Might something similar happen in the intellectual development of a child?  Do we go through all of the philosophical errors of the past as we grow up?  Does the history of philosophy mirror the history of Helena's thinking?

Probably not.  But if she comes up with some sort of ideas about the phlogiston or the geocentric universe, you can trust I'll be paying attention.