Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.

My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn't make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That's one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye - once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.

Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.

Schrödinger's cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in the box with it, the same would apply to you. So you really don't want to do that.

Even if no learning to speak of was involved in locking my mental term onto doorknobs, it is odd to say that therefore my possession of a doorknob concept is innate, just as it is odd to say that my head-injury-caused singing is innate.

Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about colour differences, and have 'thrown away' more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our colour experiences can't.