ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how Zing-Yang Kuo's epigenetic view of behavior, summarized in his 1967 monograph The Dynamics of Behavior Development, continues to contribute to psychological sciences as we move into the twenty-first century. It argues that Kuo's writings, while somewhat peculiar and iconoclastic in style, provide a useful organizing framework for guiding attempts to understand the emergence, maintenance, and modification of behavioral traits and characteristics. Kuo's thinking on behavior anticipated many of the conceptual advances in comparative and developmental psychology achieved, including dynamic, probabilistic , and systems approaches to behavior development. For Kuo, the term behavioral gradients represented the fact that any given response of the organism to its environment, whether it be internal or external in origin, always involved the whole organism. Throughout his unusual and often interrupted career, Kuo argued that behavior does not begin at birth or hatching and that prenatal experience cannot be overlooked in attempts to account for the nature and path of behavior development.
