Justin Garson on the incoherence of innate biological traits, and proposing the robust-plastic continuum

In chapter 4, Nature and Nurture, of Justin Garson’s The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction, Garson takes the nature/nurture debate head on.

Put briefly, Garson argues that the biological concept of “innateness” is confused, bordering on meaningless. Garson proposes that we instead distinguish traits along a robust/plastic continuum.

In this chapter, I’ll tackle the idea of innateness. I agree with those biologists, philosophers, and psychologists who think the idea of innateness borders on meaninglessness, and that the distinction between innate and acquired is a bad way to think about development. Then, I’ll discuss ways that evolutionary approaches to the mind could get on just fine without the idea of innateness. Specifically, it would be more fruitful to make a distinction between traits that are relatively “robust,” and those that are relatively “plastic.” The distinction between robustness and plasticity captures an important phenomenon but does so without presupposing the idea of innateness.

The robust/plastic distinction places traits on a continuum of appearing more reliably across generations despite both environmental and genetic variations. For example, in humans, having eyes is a robust trait, having blue eyes is less robust.

The property of robustness has these characteristics:

Robustness is a property of degrees. That is, traits can be more or less robust.
Robustness is relative to specific developmental factors.
Robustness describes a phenomenon rather than a causal mechanism.
And robustness cuts across the innate/acquired distinction. (The property of having a normal BMI is robust for humans, but involves both genes and environment.)

I think the robust/plastic continuum is useful and I look forward to seeing it used as a tool of analysis. However, I think Garson doesn’t quite take on the issue that innateness is trying to get at. I agree with Konrad Lorenz: the concept of innateness is both meaningful and useful.

Let’s analogize it: Physicists study light. However, much of their work is theoretical, humans don’t actually observe the photons or other causal mechanisms directly. If I were to take a position similar to Garson’s, I might say, “Since that is the case, we can only speak of light as it is observed, existing on a continuum of light/dark and interacting with the environment, including our visual perception, to produce the phenomena of light.” While that’s true in some sense, and a useful analytical approach, it would still be worthwhile and meaningful to explore the causal mechanisms of light.

Additionally, one of Garson’s attacks on the “genes and environment” route, a la Lorenz, is poorly formulated:

We can’t ask, “How tall would I be if I didn’t have any genes?” or, “How much would I weigh if I didn’t have an environment?”

The first question is a correct formulation because, I believe, genes encode something. (What Lorenz is trying to get at.) However, Garson’s second question is nonsensical because weight is a function of both an intrinsic (innate) property of an object and gravitational force (environment). (i.e. Weight = Mass x Gravitational Acceleration.) Ironically, if you properly formulate it, the question is meaningful: “How much mass would I have if I didn’t have an environment (no gravity)?”

Garson, Justin. (2014). The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315771878