The concept of innateness is a part of folk wisdom but is also used by biologists and cognitive scientists. This concept has a legitimate role to play in science only if the colloquial usage relates to a coherent body of evidence. We examine many different candidates for the post of scientific successor of the folk concept of innateness. We argue that none of these candidates is entirely satisfactory. Some of the candidates are more interesting and useful than others, but the interesting candidates are not equivalent to each other and the empirical and evidential relations between them are far from clear. Researchers have treated the various scientific notions that capture some aspect of the folk concept of innateness as equivalent to each other or at least as tracking properties that are strongly correlated with each other. But whether these correlations exist is an empirical issue. This empirical issue has not been thoroughly investigated because in the attempt to create a bridge between the folk view and their theories, researchers have often assumed that the properties must somehow cluster. Rather than making further attempts to import the folk concept of innateness into the sciences, efforts should now be made to focus on the empirical questions raised by the debates and pave the way to a better way of studying the development of living organisms. Such empirical questions must be answered before it can be decided whether a good scientific successor -in the form of a concept that refers to a collection of biologically significant properties that tend to co-occur -can be identified or whether the concept of innateness deserves no place in science.

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The idea of the innate and the acquired is a part of folk-biology but is also used by biologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists in their disciplines. Are they right to do so? Innateness is often defined by appealing to the role of genes in development, to the role of Darwinian evolution in shaping developmental processes, to the non-involvement of learning during development, to developmental robustness, and to modularity. We argue that all such definitions are unsatisfactory. Some are unsatisfactory because they are based on simplistic and empirically outmoded views of development. Others are empirically defensible but are unsatisfactory because they do not capture the full breadth of the use of the term ''innate'' and, due to this restriction, they can easily lead to inferential mistakes. The definition of acquired behavior has been used with greater sophistication and is generally regarded as being heterogeneous. Nevertheless, in as much as the overall category has been seen in opposition to the innate, it has been an obstacle to a thorough investigation of how behavior develops. We suggest that a useful way forward is to examine whether or not the empirically well-established properties often associated with the concept of innate and the concept of acquired form theoretically useful clusters. This path leads to a much fuller appreciation of the view favored by Gilbert Gottlieb, according to which development involves the continuous interplay of the organism (and its genes) with its environment. ß 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 49: 818-831, 2007.

The concept of innateness is often used in explanations and classifications of biological and cognitive traits. But does this concept have a legitimate role to play in contemporary scientific discourse? Empirical studies and theoretical developments have revealed that simple and intuitively appealing ways of classifying traits (e.g. genetically specified versus owing to the environment) are inadequate. They have also revealed a variety of scientifically interesting ways of classifying traits each of which captures some aspect of the innate/non-innate distinction. These include things such as whether a trait is canalized, whether it has a history of natural selection, whether it developed without learning or without a specific set of environmental triggers, whether it is causally correlated with the action of certain specific genes, etc. We offer an analogy: the term 'jade' was once thought to refer to a single natural kind; it was then discovered that it refers to two different chemical compounds, jadeite and nephrite. In the same way, we argue, researchers should recognize that 'innateness' refers not to a single natural kind but to a set of (possibly related) natural kinds. When this happens, it will be easier to progress in the field of biological and cognitive sciences.

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