What does ’innate’ mean?

The concept of innate is important in both Biology and Psychology. What is it, exactly?

The concept of the innate stands theoretically in opposition to that of the acquired, forming the space in which both create a complementary duality on which stands a complementary duality.It forms the space in which both create a complementary duality on which the human being is built.

Understanding the importance of the innate and the acquired allows us to understand the different mechanisms that underlie the expression of one's own individuality and the influences that can act on it during development.

The meaning of the word 'innate'

The word innate comes from the Latin word innatus. At the etymological level it can be divided into two constituent elements: the prefix in, which alludes to a reality inherent or located within; and the suffix natus, whose meaning is "born".

Therefore, it is understood as innate any expression of a living being that is part of its potential baggage from the moment of birth, without any direct learning experience with the natural environment.without any direct learning experience with the natural environment.

Thus, in general, it is understood that innate is everything that an individual expresses without the need to have learned it through personal experiences with the environment, only by the fact of having a genetic baggage that shapes its biology and the corresponding emotional or behavioral substrate that may depend on it. For psychology, this is a nuclear concept in its objective of understanding the mind and behavior of human beings.

Three different perspectives have been postulated to explain innatism throughout the historical evolution of the construct. All of them remain important, as this is a matter of ongoing debate, with evidence for and against in all cases. We review below the basic aspects of all these approaches.

1. Extreme innatism or modularity

From this perspective, the mind is understood as a relatively organized set of modules specialized in specific domains or skills, which are sensitive to certain types of information.

When this information is found in the environment, a preprogrammed form of processing is set in motion, automatic and devoid of the individual's will. It is for this reason that, in the result of this learning, the innate acquires a special relevance.

The best known example is that of language. Different authors have defended the existence of a universal grammar, that is, a series of rules common to all human beings that allow the acquisition of verbal and symbolic codes as they interact with others in their social environment. Some examples of theorists who have postulated explanatory models from this perspective are Chomsky or Fodor.

2. Moderate innatism

In this position are those authors who share a modular vision for the structure of the mind but who conceive its innate potential as limited, so that the individual will be responsible for complementing and enriching it with the nuances of his individual experience through his exploratory behavior. There would be, therefore, a basic prior knowledge that would require contact with the environment to endow it with adaptive properties. to endow it with adaptive properties.

This prism would integrate the innate with the acquired in a comprehensive unit, giving each of these realities an important role in the acquisition of knowledge and skills that are proper to us as a species, as well as in the construction of our way of being in the world.

3. Representational innatism

This perspective is the most lax view possible on the question of innateness, although it does not completely eliminate it from the equation. While retaining certain innate capacities, the most important weight of individuality would fall on the capacity to explore and explain the world through the formulation of symbolic representations that depend on experience.

This way of understanding innatism defends the capacity of individuals to generate explanatory theories as they experience different situations, in such a way that they would not reach a final result, but would go through a constructive process that would continue throughout their lives. From this perspective, there would not exist a previous programming or a sequence of innate automatisms.Rather, it would be the individual who would be the sole architect of himself.

Biology and Psychology versus innatism

Biology and psychology have built, throughout their respective histories as scientific disciplines, a set of theoretical models that have often contemplated innate aspects from an ethological and evolutionary perspective. This scientific quest connects with some of the main questions to which philosophers and thinkers devoted their time earlier, trying to scrutinize the very nature of knowledge and identity.

Innatism and Biology

Biology plays a key role in understanding innateness, as it alludes to the concept of design.. In this context, natural selection would be responsible for perpetuating the presence of certain traits through survival screening, so that the individuals most able to cope with environmental threats could transmit their particularities from generation to generation, forming an evolutionary baggage sculpted by sexual reproduction and the passing of time.

This baggage would enable the successive descendants of any species to be endowed with a series of attributes that would improve their chances of survival, without having to face the rigors of real danger. The priming theory, which describes how people tend to develop phobias more readily toward potentially life-threatening stimuli, would be congruent with innate-induced facilitation.

Beyond the evolutionary perspective, the innate has also been contemplated as a matter of genetics and heredity.. Thus, the presence or absence of a trait would be determined by the sequence of genes that each individual might present in the specific configuration of his or her DNA. However, there is evidence contrary to this theoretical postulate, since phenotypic expression requires the participation of epigenetic factors (e.g., environmental).

Since the Biological and the psychological form an indissoluble reality, due to the organic substrate that underlies thoughts and behaviors, a certain degree of influence of genetic adaptations on these would be foreseeable.

Innatism and Psychology

The debate between innate and acquired arose naturally as a result of one of the first questions that human beings asked themselves. Philosophy, represented by the rationalists and the empiricists, raised the question long ago without being able to resolve it in favor of either of them. Nowadays, the concept of innate is especially championed by the theorists of evolutionary psychology, coexisting in a certain harmony.coexisting in certain harmony with the acquired.

Evolutionary Psychology brings together in its study the different forces that build the particular way in which a person expresses and feels. Although elements intrinsic to the organism that contribute to its maturation are recognized, they are complemented by equally influential forces, such as the social and natural environment. The person is therefore the product of the intersection between the organic and the cultural, between phylogeny and ontogeny, between the acquired and the learned.

Psychology understands that every cognitive mechanism has an adaptive function.The fact that a set of beings that have a cognitive mechanism has an adaptive function, in such a way that its first purpose was to provide an advantage to the animal that wielded it in contrast with the animal that did not, in an evident parallelism with what we know about organic qualities. The fact that a group of living beings adopted common strategies to solve a problem, as occurred in the collective hunting of predators, is an example of this.

Human reality: a question of confluences

The human being is a biopsychosocial reality of extreme complexity, which implies the existence of multiple forces acting on him during the process of gestation of his individuality. Our central nervous system developed over millennia in a physical and social context full of threats to life, different from the one in which we live. different from the one that exists today for most people in the world, and this has left a phylogenetic imprint on our most primitive brain.

Measuring the extent of this imprint is by no means simple, but it involves a series of mechanisms that influence multiple basic processes, such as emotional and perceptual ones. We cannot therefore avoid the relevance of the innate in the range of our thoughts and emotions, since the substrate on which they are based was formed through the vicissitudes that homo sapiens had to live through during countless generations.

The human being is not, therefore, a tabula rasa.. He does not come into the world devoid of tools with which to solve the first puzzles that existence will put in front of him. The communication, perceptual and motor functions already have a nucleus of organization in the child's mind, requiring only the stimulus of experience to build a sophisticated body of skills that will contribute to his ability to live a full life.

Undoubtedly, the human being is also an animal endowed with extraordinary creative and symbolic capacities, which allow him to transcend to a great extent the yoke of innate conditioning to build himself from personal experience. As it is buffeted by its evolutionary history and life history, it continues to unravel the enormous mystery of its own mind and the space it occupies in nature.

Bibliographical references:

• Garcia, C.L. (2005). Innatism and Biology: Towards a Biological Concept of Innate. Journal of Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 20(2), 167-182.
• Enesco, I. and Delval, J. (2006). Modules, Domains and other Artifacts. Childhood and Learning, 29(3), 249-267.