Non-art Related Readings on Innate Traits

read some very interesting Stanford articles on innateness in relation to biology and nativism vs empiricism, biologically and psychologically speaking. The first article was 2009 and talked about how innateness as a term might be useless. It refers to most biological traits being based on a combination of heredity and environment [nature vs nurture as I had mentioned earlier]. It has a nice graphical representation using Waddington’s developmental landscape and under-pinings

This suggests the complex relationship of how something can be more influenced by heredity but not completely controlled by that and vise versa — so you have a gene that will create an enzyme in cold temperatures. But if you change the environment, you can control the trait even though the trait is highly hereditary.

Also mentions the male rat copulation trait. So apparently male rats produce a hormone that tells mother rats to lick their genital area and by doing so it exercises a part of the male’s spine that will then be functional in allowing it to copulate. So it is not innate that male rats can copulate. It is a combination of genetic and environmental factors at play. They also discuss how sex in many species is also not innate.

Generally the paper suggests innate as a term is probably not worth looking into, but does mention that Chomsky’s language acquisition theory and Universal Grammar suggest that perhaps there might still be something to it.

I think this is an interesting quote and why I went on to find out more:

“Developmental psychobiologists reject a basic idea at the heart of much discussion of innateness, which is that evolution makes development reliable by making it insensitive to environmental parameters. Instead, they argue that evolution often makes development reliable by stabilizing environmental parameters at the right value or by exploiting pre-existing environmental regularities.”

This quote seems to suggest what’s noted below — the use of the Bayes Theorem to enable quick learning [formation of traits]. Yes, you put through some environmental variables into a Bayesian system/algorithm/function, and you get a trait that can be passed on epigenetically or genetically through evolution or simply comes into existence on a very regular basis even if never passed on, because it is partially the environment but also partially due to this innate a priori knowledge that allows the Bayesian system to find the solution quickly. ?

Cowbird song. They leave their eggs for other species to hatch/raise so they if they have their own song and always learn it, they must have it innately. They found though that their song develops from the females showing a preference to the males song attempts and their preference is based on social influences. At the same time though, they also pick up some regional traits in their songs depending on who they were raised by. So perhaps not innate or perhaps an innate system but the stimuli has to be there to get the outcome trait.

It’s an interesting read that lead me to the next essay.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innate-acquired/

I went on to find out more — move to a 2014 article about Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition. Here we see a much stronger argument for innateness. Particularly in relation to theories of mind and in alignment with my theory of the computational mind with relation to neural networks and learning algorithms. I feel that if the brain is made up in one biological way, and is used as a system, then that system would have these programs and while the input and thus output would be different, the programs or at least the choice of programs could be the same. Well apparently Connectionism is based on similar ideas. And Bayesian systems or Bayes’ theorem can be applied in a way that is useful. It is an algorithm that helps us predict successful solutions/approaches to issues. Think of machine learning of recognizing a human face. Enter in five million examples and it learns to predict quite accurately perhaps. Well if you had to start from nothing this could take a very long time. What if you started with some a priori information for the Bayesian formula? Then it could be done more quickly and this might better account for how humans develop certain theories of mind and other traits which seem to not take as long/as many resources as an Empiricist tabla rasa would require.

The paper discusses examples of understanding number concepts, and theory of mind like object permanence and the idea of ‘other minds’ and mentions the whole, “children under 3.5 dont understand what Timmy will think” experiment. And they say that there has been evidence that even in infants, this has actually been shown now. As has an understanding of numbers, but interestingly it’s in like blocks where they can see that over time/age humans come to understand larger quantities etc. So like discrete growth of understanding. Either way, the more recent tests suggest that the older results are not good for proving nativism wrong. Also they mention the light from above ‘instinct’ in perceiving images and that chickens do this too apparently: “The view that the illumination constraint is innate is also supported by the fact that chickens reared in an abnormal illuminated-from-below environment still react as we do to stimuli (a) and (b) (Hershberger 1970).”

There were a lot of examples including rats that learned with only a single smell and sickness that they would never eat it again.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-cognition/

The Top Down vs Bottom Up approaches to visual perception seem compatible when used with a Bayesian system, no?

http://www.simplypsychology.org/perception-theories.html

reading about optical illusions and cross-cultural susceptibility scores to them.

This one suggests differences across cultures could be due to current environmental learning over the years BUT could also be due to smaller visual cortex — this of course could be environmental too. Does suggest that any susceptibility though could perhaps start from an innate perception basis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzo_illusion

this one too was showing signs of environment [carpenterizaton — interesting term!] on susceptibility but then someone said it was due to differences of pigmentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion

This is a pretty cool article and shows a lot of cross-cultural differences for visual perception: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~tmasuda/PublishedPapers/Masuda2009.pdf