Introduction

According to an influential view in contemporary cognitive science, many human cognitive capacities are innate. The primary support for this view comes from ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments. In general outline, such arguments contrast the meagre informational input to cognitive development with its rich informational output. Consider the ease with which humans acquire languages, become facile at attributing psychological states (‘folk psychology’), gain knowledge of biological kinds (‘folk biology’), or come to understand basic physical processes (‘folk physics’). In all these cases, the evidence available to a growing child is far too thin and noisy for it to be plausible that the underlying principles involved are derived from general learning mechanisms. This only alternative hypothesis seems to be that the child's grasp of these principles is innate. (Cf. Laurence and Margolis, 2001.)

At the same time, it is often hard to understand how this kind of thing could be innate. How exactly did these putatively innate cognitive abilities evolve? The notion of innateness is much contested—we shall return to this issue at the end of the paper—but on any understanding the innateness of some complex trait will require a suite of genes which contributes significantly to its normal development. Yet, as I shall shortly explain, there are often good reasons for doubting that standard evolutionary processes could possibly have selected such suites of genes.

In this paper I want to outline a non-standard evolutionary process that could well have been responsible for the genetic evolution of many complex cognitive traits. This will in effect vindicate cognitive nativism against the charge of evolutionary implausibility. But at the same time it will cast cognitive nativism in a somewhat new light.