As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently had the opportunity to attend some of the sessions of the “Future Directions in Genetic Studies” workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the talks was by Paul Griffiths, a Philosophy professor from Sydney, Australia, who discussed “The Distinction between Innate and Acquired Characteristics.”

Griffiths’ talk focused on the troubled use of the word “innate.”  Also troubled are various synonyms of “innate,” including “instinctual,” and “human nature.” These terms all seem to engender confusion more than anything else, because there is a wide variety of potential meanings to these terms.  Can’t we all agree on what it means to be “innate,” so that we can understand each other when we use that word? As you see from this post, Griffiths is not optimistic.

Griffiths spent the first part of his lecture unpacking quite a bit of history of the biology of behavior. Many prominent scientists weighed on the use of the term “innate” during the 20th century. They include a staunch critic of behaviorism, Zing yang Kuo, “a terrific writer,” whose 1920 article, entitled “How are our Instincts acquired?” Griffiths highly recommended (I can’t find that article, but here is another of Kuo’s articles). Griffiths also mentioned the “instinct theorists,” including William McDougall (Griffiths commented that many of these theorists were actually dualists). Another of the instinct theorists was Niko Tinbergen, who argued that there is something about animal instincts that cannot be reduced.

Konrad Lorenz was …