| Abstract: | The habit of thinking about ontogeny and phylogeny as alternative means by which information is made available to the developing individual has a long history in both biology and psychology. This article examines existing proximate (ontogenetic) and ultimate (preontogenetic) approaches to the study of human development and describes an alternative, developmental systems approach for directing research programs. On this view, phenotypes are not simply transmitted in the genes, nor are they contained in features of the environment. Rather, traits or characters are always constructed by the complex coaction of organic, organismic, and environmental factors operating during individual ontogeny. This expanded, systematic view of heredity and phenotypic development serves to eliminate the need for the dichotomization of developmental explanations into proximate and ultimate causes and directs research attention to the organism-context transaction process, thereby including a large class of variables typically omitted from preontogenetic explanations of development. |
