In 'higher' animals, such as humans, ontogeny can be understood as being made up of three, broad chronological phases: conception to puberty; puberty to maturity; and maturity to death. During the first phase, the senses and the elementary skills of their application are acquired by developing awareness through practice and relationships. Later developments then build recursively on these early acquisitions.

..what offspring inherit from parents is not simply genes, but a structured developmental system. This developmental system provides sources of both stability and variability, and the structure and interactions among components of an organism's developmental system are as causally informative to the development and transmission of phenotypic traits as are the strands of DNA contained within this system.

The sense we associate with the most is perhaps that of sight —feeling that we look out through our eyes— yet nature only delivers its functional, cellular infrastructure, sight itself is constructed through nurture, from the experience of shade and colour, delivered through the environmental feedback mechanisms of early ontogenetic learning, a form of learning rooted deep in the early evolution of multicellular beings from the time that land plants first emerged.

Traditionally it has been assumed that fish orientation and migration were to a large extent hard-wired. But .. many fish species possess spatial as well as temporal memory and exert a behavioral flexibility reflecting their ability to learn during ontogeny . .. if we suppose that the cognitive capacities of modern fish species have not changed too much since ray-finned fish appeared, then advanced learning skills have been a part of life on Earth for more than 400 million years.