Having arisen within the species as a result of selection pressure, without teaching. Innate propensities may be expressed at or by birth, or only emerge later. An innate tendency to attend to human faces emerges early, while an innate tendency to attend to where someone is pointing emerges months later. In studying the human mind, the concept of innateness has had a chequered career. It was opposed by John Locke (1632-1704) in his book Essays concerning human understanding in which he proposed that the human mind was a tabula rasa (blank slate): nothing was innate, knowledge being acquired from experience. Following Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and his nativist stance, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) adopted that the properties of the mind showed traces of innateness, a view not entirely shared by his contemporary William James as witnessed by his opening sentence of Chapter IV, entitled Habit, of his of his book The principles of psychology:
“When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strikes us is that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent to be the result of education. The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those due to education would by most persons be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life, and that one engaged in studying the objective manifestations of the mind is bound at the very outset to define clearly just what it limits are.”
Claims like this, even if a reasonable balanced one like that of James, were based on little more than intuition and personal preference. Nevertheless, they led to prolonged and bitter debates pitting innate/maturation against experience/learning that still rear their heads in perhaps more subtle expositions today. The concept of innateness gathered force in classical ethology during the 1960s and 70s with notions of fixed action patterns, and to some extent ethology nativist stance at that time influenced some aspects of developmental psychology such as attachment. Other interpretations of innate are evident, but none of them address the epigenetic nature of ontogenetic development.
See Attachment theory, CONSPEC, Ethology, Epigenesis, Experience, Face recognition, Fixed action pattern (FAP), Generative grammar approach, Innate (2), Innate (3), Innate versus acquired dichotomy, Instinct (1), Instinct (2), Learning, Nativism, Maturation, Maturation versus learning, Mental modules, Modularity, Object permanence. Parameters (linguistics)