Has the innateness concept helped or hindered the understanding of behavioural and cognitive development

The concept of innateness is a part of folk wisdom but is also used by biologists and cognitive scientists, albeit in various ways. The folk distinction between innate and non-innate traits is applied differently. While some of the proposed uses are clearly faulty, other proposals appeal to conceptual tools that are useful for studying biological development. These include the concepts of ‘Darwinian adaptation’, ‘not learned’ and ‘developmentally robust’. Since each of these notions captures an important aspect of the intuitive distinction between innate and non-innate traits, many authors have treated these notions as tracking properties that are strongly correlated with each other. The existence of these correlations is an empirical issue that has not been thoroughly investigated. If the correlations exist, then a fuzzy innate/non-innate distinction may survive and have a legitimate role in science. We are sceptical, however, whether two categories of innate and not innate traits will be uncovered by such an investigation. We believe that the assumption that a dichotomy will be revealed hinders a deeper understanding of the development of behaviour and cognition.