EvoDevo as Cognitive Psychology

The editor-in-chief of Biological Theory invited me to submit a short paper on the theoretical intersections between evolu- tionary developmental biology, on the one hand, and behavior and cognition on the other. My first reaction was that I had not thought about such a topic in years. But he had planted the seed (or tweaked the engram) of that relationship. I grad- ually came to realize that my recent research in the history of evolutionary developmental biology (now called EvoDevo) has produced results that blend in an intriguing way with the research program that began my scholarly career, the history of mid-20th century experimental psychology, and especially the debates between behaviorist and cognitive psychological theories. The modest insight I will offer here does not concern the current relations between the sciences of biology and psychology, but how we perceive their histories. I will first describe how I came to study the history of EvoDevo and then report on how recent results have taken me back to the beginning. My early study of psychological debates was centered on the correspondences between substantive psychological theo- ries (behaviorist versus cognitivist) and the scientific method- ologies with which they were pursued. Behaviorism was allied with a kind of positivist, operationalist, or phenome- nalistmethodologicalapproach,andcognitivismwithmethod- ological realism. Each theory/methodology pair was internally