A. A Valid Question?

Certainly some people who call themselves nativists and empiricists believe it is (e.g., Spelke, 1998; Haith, 1998), but others contend that nature and nurture are inseparable and that asking whether something is innate is meaningless or misguided (e.g., Lehrman, 1953; Hinde, 1974). I will argue that the debate can be misguided, but that it is still possible to ask meaningful questions about the extent to which a cognitive process is innate or learned.

Many psychologists, when addressing such issues, begin with the obligatory statement that nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy (e.g., Jacobson, 1974). Nonetheless, although these critics maintain that psychologists should look at the interaction between the organism and the environment, they still go on to implicitly support this dichotomy with synonymous terminology such learned versus innate behavior, closed versus open programs of development, biological constraints and predispositions, and hard-wired versus soft-wired behavior (Johnston, 1987). I will argue that the nature-nurture dichotomy has shortcomings and can be used inappropriately, but that it can be valid, useful, and interesting when answering a particular type of question. The general type of question is: Is the first appearance of a behavior or psychological mechanism a result of interaction with the aspect of the environment that it concerns? I will consider this question specifically in the context of human behavior and psychology, but let us first explore how the study of animal behavior and psychology has set the stage for the nature-nurture debate.

Lorenz (1937) proposed that deprivation experiments be used to determine whether a given behavior was learned or innate. This works well in simple cases in which removal of an environmental stimulus clearly does or does not eliminate a behavior, but future ethologists showed that many cases are not so simple. Marler (1993) used bird song to show that animal behavior is often best characterized by instincts to learn, treating nature and nurture no longer as a dichotomy but an interaction. Unlike Lorenz, Marler showed that innate mechanisms are not necessarily determined to follow a single, stereotyped path. Instead, certain primitives reside in an organism without any environmental stimulation, but these primitives are modified by innate mechanisms by which organisms learn from their environment.