Domestication and comparative psychology: Status and strategy.

Study of animal domestication lacks a conceptual framework to integrate genetic and environmental factors into a coherent theory of domestic phenotypes, and researchers have conceptually and experimentally separated the contributions of these influences. We critically examine genetic and environmental approaches to domestication and describe an alternative, developmental systems approach. In this view, domestic phenotypes are not transmitted in the genes nor contained in features of captive environments but are constructed by coaction of organic, organismic, and environmental factors during ontogeny. Thus, animals are similar or not in the expression of phenotypic traits, not because they share or lack similar genes, but because they share or lack similar developmental systems. This view of heredity and development directs attention to the animal–context transaction and includes many variables that have been omitted from analyses of domestication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)