What does 'innate' mean?

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 the human being stands.

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

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The meaning of the word 'innate'

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

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

Thus, in general, it is understood that what is innate is everything that an individual expresses without the need to have learned it through personal experiences with the environment, solely due to the fact of having genetic baggage that shapes its biology and the corresponding emotional or behavioral substrate that could depend. For Psychology, it is a core concept in its objective of understanding the mind and behavior of human beings.

Three different perspectives have been postulated to explain innateness. throughout the historical evolution of the construct. All of them continue to be important, since it is a matter subject to debate today, with evidence for and against for all cases. Below we review the basics of all of these approaches.

1. Extreme nativism 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 is in the environment, a preprogrammed form of processing is launched, automatic and devoid of the will of the individual. 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, of a series of rules common to all beings. that allow the acquisition of verbal and symbolic codes as they interact with others in their environment social. Some examples of theorists who have postulated explanatory models from this perspective are Chomsky or Fodor.

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2. moderate nativism

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 it will be the individual, through his exploratory conduct, who is responsible for complementing and enriching him with the nuance of his experience. individual. Therefore, there would be basic prior knowledge that would require contact with the environment. to endow it with adaptive properties.

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

3. representational nativism

This perspective assumes the most lax view possible on the issue of nativism, although it does not remove it entirely from the equation. Conserving certain innate abilities, the most important weight of individuality would fall on the ability to explore and explain the world through the formulation of symbolic representations that depend on experience.

This way of understanding nativism defends the ability of individuals to generate explanatory theories as they live differently. situations, in such a way that a final result would not be reached, but rather a constructive process that would last throughout the entire life. From this perspective, there would be no prior programming or a sequence of innate automatisms., but it would be the individual who would rise as the only architect of himself.

Biology and Psychology versus innateness

Biology and Psychology have built, throughout their respective histories as scientific disciplines, a set of theoretical models that have often viewed innate aspects from an ethological perspective and evolutionary. This scientific search connects with some of the main questions that philosophers and thinkers they spent their time before, trying to scrutinize the very nature of knowledge and identity.

Nativism and Biology

Biology plays a key role in understanding the innate, since 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, in such a way that the most apt individuals for deal with the threats of the environment could transmit their particularities from generation to generation, forming an evolutionary baggage sculpted by sexual reproduction and the evolution of the time.

This baggage would allow 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 a danger real. The theory of preparation, which describes the way in which people tend to develop phobias more quickly toward potentially life-threatening stimuli would be consistent with a facilitation induced from the innate.

Beyond the evolutionary perspective, the innate has also been seen as a matter dependent on genetics and heredity. Thus, the presence or absence of a trait would be determined by the gene sequence that each individual could present in the specific configuration of their DNA. However, there is evidence contrary to this theoretical postulate, since the phenotypic expression requires the participation of epigenetic factors (environmental, for example).

Since the biological and the psychological form an indissoluble reality, due to the organic substratum that underlies the thoughts and behaviors, a certain degree of influence of genetic adaptations on these.

Nativism and Psychology

The debate between what is innate and what is acquired arose naturally as a result of one of the first questions that human beings asked themselves. Philosophy, represented by rationalists and empiricists, raised the question a long time ago without it being able to be resolved in favor of either of them. Today the concept of innate is especially championed by theorists of Evolutionary Psychology, coexisting in a certain harmony with what has been acquired.

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

From Psychology it is understood that all cognitive mechanisms have an adaptive function, in such a way that its first purpose was to provide an advantage to the animal that wielded it in contrast to the one that did not, in obvious 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 hunt for predators, is an example of this.

Human reality: a matter of confluences

The human being is a biopsychosocial reality of extreme complexity, which implies the existence of multiple forces that act 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 that currently exists for the majority of people in the world, and this has meant a phylogenetic imprint imprinted on our most primitive brain.

Measuring the scope of this footprint is by no means easy, but it involves a series of mechanisms that influence multiple basic processes, such as emotional and perceptual ones. Therefore, we cannot avoid the relevance of what is innate in the range of our thoughts and emotions, since the substrate on which they settle was formed through the vicissitudes that homo sapiens had to live through endless years. generations.

The human being is not, therefore, a tabula rasa. He does not arrive in the world devoid of tools with which to solve the first puzzles that existence will put before him. Communication, perceptual, and motor functions already have a nucleus of organization in the child's mind; needing only the spur of experience to build a sophisticated body of skills that will contribute to his ability to live a fulfilling life.

Undoubtedly, the human being is also an animal endowed with extraordinary creative and symbolic capacities, which allow him to greatly transcend the yoke of innate conditioning to build oneself from experience staff. As he is battered by its evolutionary history and his life story, he continues to unravel the vast mystery of his own mind and the space he occupies in nature.

Bibliographic references:

• Garcia, C. L. (2005). Innatism and Biology: towards a Biological Concept of the 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.