Comparative psychology, a new perspective for the 21st century: Response to criticism

The editor’s choice of Denenberg, Lickliter, and Moore to comment on our article was highly appropriate. All are important contributors to the field of comparative psychology. Lickliter and Moore are not only familiar with the general position we have espoused but they are often linked to it. Denenberg, of course, across a distinguished career has been a major contributor to comparative psychology, most significantly in the area of early experience and development, and development is a key focus of our article. We are appreciative of the nature and tone of these comments, and we take them to be generally supportive of the position we have outlined. We think the commentaries may even serve as supplements to our original article. Our response addresses areas of disagreement and instances in which we have apparently not provided extensive enough discourse to make our points clear. Let us state at the outset that we intended this article to be an introductory statement of the approach to comparative psychology we are offering. There is only so much that can be said in a journal article. We have developed this position more extensively in a recent book, Principles of Comparative Psychology (Greenberg & Haraway, 2002), but that too was intended to be an introduction to what we recognize to be a long-term research and theoretical effort. Dynamic systems theory is still somewhat new in science, and has only recently been embraced by psychology— although certainly not all psychologists see its relevance. The points addressed by the commentators are excellent ones and draw little dissent from our perspective. Indeed, the major emphases in the commentaries are to point to a divergence of emphasis and aim rather than contradiction. Our hope was to introduce a metatheoretical perspective about comparative psychology, which has historical roots in the field and has more recently gained empirical and methodological support. In this introduction, we chose to emphasize two of the more overarching principles of this metatheoretical approach: the levels concept and anagenesis, and their exemplification in the approach/withdrawal concept developed by Schneirla (1959). In addition, we had hoped to provide a brief demonstration of the congruence of the concepts and methods of nonlinear dynamic systems approaches and the developmental systems perspective of comparative psychology. We concur that developmental heterochrony and general behavioral influences on evolutionary change are extremely important concepts in the perspective of comparative psychology that we propose; they are more specific concepts which are tacit in the principles we outlined in our article. The development of neophenotypes (Gottlieb, 1992, 1997; Johnston & Gottlieb, 1990) as a result of extragenetic developmental changes is a primary example of the dynamic interplay of levels of factors across both spatial (i.e., organisms and cells) and temporal (i.e., ontogeny and phylogeny) levels (Li, 2002, 2003). Our decision not to highlight these more specific concepts more directly does not reflect our view of their importance so much as it reflects an editorial decision given the constraints of journal space. We chose to focus on more abstract and encompassing concepts. We discerned at least three themes in the commentaries: (a) We presented a view of comparative psychology that is abiological, (b) we seem to have divorced comparative psychology and behavior from evolutionary thinking, and (c) comparative psychology is not meaningfully identified as general psychology. Our response addresses each of these themes in turn.