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Margo Wilson has a helpful review of Matt Ridley's Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human. Ridley has a real talent for getting across hard ideas using telling examples. In grad school i often argued something like the following in favor of evolutionary epistemology, and against Humean associationism. Because most philosophers have little interest in disciplines outside their own, what I ran into was deaf ears. Anyway, here is Ridley's telling example:

Another illustration of why nature and nurture are not opposites is provided by studies of how monkeys come to fear snakes. Naive laboratory-raised monkeys become fearful after witnessing another monkey's fearful reaction, even on videotape. However, they cannot be made to fear equally novel flowers by an identical manipulation. Ridley tells us about these experiments to show that learning is not arbitrary, but is somehow biased toward useful associations .. Arne Öhman and colleagues in Sweden have used Pavlovian conditioning to demonstrate that people, too, can readily learn to fear snakes, but not flowers nor even modern dangerous objects such as electrical sockets. They have, furthermore, shown that this learning occurs even when brief exposures and "masking stimuli" leave the experimental subjects unaware that there ever was a picture of a snake. In this case, the origins of the fear are inaccessible to conscious knowledge, leaving the phobics (and their analysts) free to fabricate their histories.

Posted by Greg Ransom