> We were all born without any knowledge whatsoever of how the world works
Is that really true? A google for "babies are hardwired to" brings up a enormous number of results.
Is that really true? A google for "babies are hardwired to" brings up a enormous number of results.
This, of course, extends to our minds as well. Simply the structure of our brain has an immense impact. Even if you don't believe that our neurons are pre-trained to know some things, you'd have to admit that our brain is wired in a way that allows us to learn quite efficiently in this world. But psychology is quite complicated, so it's hard to say what exactly is nature and what nurture.
Technically, when first life began, it really was without knowledge. Over time, organisms learned and adapted more and more to our environment, both physically and mentally.
I think honestly, the line between nature and nurture really depends on what you believe makes you human, conscious, and existing with awareness. You can technically define the entire existence of the universe as a process of changing states of information (some of which may not be measurable).
Which might be a good discussion subject, the first knowledge about the environment might have been how to get energy from somewhere
* Babies will immediately seek out face-like patterns and turn their faces towards them (http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_babies_work/2013/04/03/babies...). Babies would turn their faces to animal faces, too, so it's broad face recognition.
* Although babies make smiling motions soon after birth, at about 6 weeks they start to make social similes (http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/babys-first-social-smile). This surely is not learned behavior.
* Language learning. Chomsky's Universal Grammar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar) posits that we are born with a language faculty that has a lot of switches about language, we just set the switches by being exposed to a particular language.
At some points it certainly seems like we need to measure the pain in our foot and fit it to a curve, to know we've shot ourselves in it.