The innate and the acquired: Useful clusters or a residual distinction from folk biology?

Abstract

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.

Hardwiring: innateness in the age of the brain

“…The concept of module is also evoked by Bateson and Martin (2000, p. 87) in their discussion of instincts (see quotation above, p. 30) and by Bateson & Mameli (2007) in their analysis of innateness.…”

“…(p. 179) For Mameli and Bateson (2006), then, scientists should not use labels such as "innate" until they can demonstrate that the defining properties of the concept are highly correlated. In the absence of such correlation, what is innate according to one connotation might not be innate according to another connotation, and vice versa (see their Table 2, p. 180); therefore, the distinction between innate and not-innate (e.g., acquired or learned) does not rely on a coherent body of empirical evidence (see also Bateson & Mameli, 2007). This lack of coherence raises serious issues regarding the usefulness of "innate" in science.…”

Amusing ourselves to death? Superstimuli and the evolutionary social sciences

“…As others have argued (e.g. Bateson & Mameli 2007, Mameli 2008), the inference from highly environmentally canalized to not learned is not always warranted. Apart from this philosophical problem, however, there is little or no theoretical and empirical support for the idea that stronger responses to superstimuli are generally the effect of non-learned recognition system biases.…”

Getting to the start line: how bumblebees and honeybees are visually guided towards their first floral contact

“…The term ''innate'' (or a synonym, ''instinctive''), though it persists in the biological literature, is problematic (Bateson, 1984;Oyama, 2000;Scholz, 2002;Bateson and Mameli, 2007;Bateson, 2006, 2011) because it can take on several noninterchangeable meanings (e.g. adaptive, unmodifiable, inborn, hardwired, unlearned, species-specific, etc.).…”