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Innateness as genetic adaptation: Lorenz redivivus (and revised)

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Abstract

In 1965, Konrad Lorenz grounded the innate–acquired distinction in what he believed were the only two possible sources of information that can underlie adaptedness: phylogenetic and individual experience. Phylogenetic experience accumulates in the genome by the process of natural selection. Individual experience is acquired ontogenetically through interacting with the environment during the organism’s lifetime. According to Lorenz, the adaptive information underlying innate traits is stored in the genome. Lorenz erred in arguing that genetic adaptation is the only means of accumulating information in phylogenetic (i.e., intergenerational) experience. Cultural adaptation also occurs over a phylogenetic time scale, and cultural tradition is a third source from which adaptive information can be extracted. This paper argues that genetic adaptation can be distinguished from individual and cultural adaptation in a species like Homo sapiens, in which even adaptations with a genetic component require cultural inputs and scaffolding to develop and be expressed. Examination of the way in which innateness is used in science suggests that scientists use the term, as Lorenz suggested, to designate genetic adaptations. The search for innate traits plays an essential role in generating hypotheses in ethology and psychology. In addition, designating a trait as innate establishes important facts that apply at the information-processing level of description.

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Notes

  1. In 2015 BBS stopped dividing volumes into issues. The count here does not include 25 instances in the bibliography. Besides two cases where Joshua Knobe refers to intuitions about innateness, all 322 references to innateness are made uncritically in the context of debating whether some traits are innate or not.

  2. Haeckel coined the term “phylogeny” (Greek: “origin of the race”) to refer to the process by which species diverge. Lorenz (1965), Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989), Shea (2013), and some others have used the term to mean “intergenerational.” Lorenz used “phylogenetic adaptation” to mean “genetic adaptation” on the assumption that the only sort of adaptation that can occur over intergenerational time is genetic.

  3. Chomsky has recently suggested that the key human-specific structures underlying language competence are exaptations rather than adaptations for language (Hauser et al. 2002). (On whether exaptations are “innate” in the sense defended in this paper see the subsection “Exaptations, spandrels, and genetic representation,” above.) Leaving aside the empirical tenability of this claim, many, of not the majority, of linguists think that poverty of the stimulus arguments are a useful tool to help identify possible genetic adaptations for language.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Patrick Bateson, Cecilia Heyes, Tim Lewens, David Papineau, Neven Sesardic, Kim Sterelny, and two reviewers for Biology & Philosophy for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Darwin College, University of Cambridge, Silver Street, Cambridge, CB3 9EU, UK

    Nathan Cofnas

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Cofnas, N. Innateness as genetic adaptation: Lorenz redivivus (and revised). Biol Philos 32, 559–580 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9576-0

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