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Comparisons of ontogenetic flexibility between humans and non-humans are common in both philosophy and comparative developmental psychology. Here I discuss some problems that arise for such comparisons due to the fact that human infants share far more capacities (even if unrealized) with human researchers than non-human young. This problem can be stated as follows: An infant sharing most of its capacities with a human researcher may be progressively more responsive to the researcher’s demands than a non-human cub who shares only some of its capacities with the researcher, but rather than this being due to the fact that the infant is more ontogenetically flexible (possessing capacities realizable in many ways depending on experience) than the cub it may be due to the fact that the researcher’s demands are influenced by her capacities. A consequence is that a more responsive creature may have relatively inflexible capacities that are shared with the researcher while a less responsive creature may have relatively flexible capacities that are not shared with the researcher. In this talk I clarify this problem by making explicit two ways of thinking about ontogenesis and then suggest some correctives.