I will have to pump my stepson for his thoughts on this when he comes home from college in a few days with his freshly printed philosophy degree. I was not aware there was a trend to push nurture over nature; I have long thought (and have understood the science to support) the notion that nature trumps nurture for the post part.

Genetics and social inheritance create "human nature", while it'd be unethical to do so, you'd have to vat-grow a human being with zero outside influence to see what developed "organically" on its own.

I'm a firm believer in nurture over nature.

Lock's "Tabula rasa refers to the epistemological idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception."

This article dances around the fact that what they are talking about are genetically inherited physical dispositions which are common to the human race. The effect of these base line dispositions vary tremendously depending on the natural context where an individual develops.

So while every baby may have an inborn reflex to suckle a teat, not every one of them will grow up to differentiate 22 varieties of snow. In the same way when a baby learns a language even though there are undoubtedly physical process that make this accomplishment available to all humans, they still have to learn the language to able to speak it.

I never really bought into the idea of tabula rasa. We seem to inherit predispositions from our parents that develop as we grow.

Good article. It's hardly groundbreaking, as it simply draws from older philosophies, but these sort of articles are very useful for putting things into modern terms.