What is innateness?

What is innateness?

In molecular developmental biology innateness seems as antiquated a theoretical construct as instinct and equally peripheral to any actual account of gene regulation or morphogenesis. In behavioral ecology, some authors regard the innateness concept as irretrievably confused and the term `innate' as one that all serious scientific workers should eschew (Bateson, 1991; Bateson & Martin, 1999) whilst others claim that the popular demand to know if something is "in our genes" is best construed as a question about whether a trait is an adaptation (Symons, 1992: 141). In cognitive psychology, however, whether a trait is innate is still regarded as a significant question and is often the subject of heated debate (Cowie, 1999). In an attempt to clarify what is at issue in these debates, philosophers have proposed numerous analyses of the concept of innateness. Some years ago, Stephen Stich defined innateness as the disposition to appear in the normal course of development, that is, to be part of the typical or normal phenotype of that kind of organism (Stich, 1975). More recently, Andre Ariew has analyzed innateness in terms of developmental canalization, a phenomena which he uses to clarify the intuitive idea that the innate traits are insensitive to variation in the developmental environment (Ariew, 1996; Ariew, 1999). William Wimsatt has explicated innateness using his concept of `generative entrenchment': innate traits are those upon which many other features of the organism are built and whose presence is therefore essential for normal development (Wimsatt, 1986, 1999). In this issue, James MacLaurin argues that a trait is innate if "there exists within the population some mechanism or process that maintains the developmental resources which very reliably produce the trait in question" (MacLaurin 2002, 126). Fiona Cowie and Richard Samuels have both offered methodological analyses of innateness (Cowie, 1999; Samuels, in press)...

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