From nature to nurture, and back again

Gilbert Gottlieb's developmental theory views organismic development as a multilevel system involving ongoing transactions among different levels of organization. Here, I review his conception of development as it has been influenced historically and has guided several lines of empirical inquiry focusing on auditory communication in birds. Ecological factors are considered an important means of identifying possible nonlinear (i.e., subtle or nonobvious) forms of experience that play a significant role in species-typical development. Failure to consider such nonlinearities, along with obvious linear influences, undermines the developmental point of view that Gottlieb advocated as a means of teasing apart the intricate nature of organismic development.