However, the other, more significant, kind of innateness concerns not the history of the mind but its future. Chomsky also argued that innate structure places very strong constraints on the human mind. Evolutionary psychologists who echo Chomsky say we are stuck with the same brains as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with just a little tinkering around the edges.

Many social scientists reject this second claim. A new generation of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are starting to reject it, too. In the past few years, computer scientists have developed new machine learning techniques that allow computers to make genuinely new discoveries, and cognitive scientists have begun to discover that even young children’s minds learn in much the same way. At the same time, neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is much more plastic — more influenced by experience — than we used to think.