 Gualtiero Piccinini and Robert Northcott propose that “traits are innate to the degree that they are caused by factors intrinsic to the organism at the time of its origin” (2018, 1). This is the correct definition of innateness and judgments that disagree with it should be revised, although they suggest that only those “untutored” in biology will make such divergent judgments (2018, 1). Their proposal relies on three key ideas, intrinsic factors, the organism’s moment of origin, and degree of causal explanation. The idea of intrinsic factors is meant as a superior alternative to the idea that innate phenotypes depend on genes or on inherited factors. Those two ideas are replaced by the idea of “properties that organisms have in virtue of what’s within their boundaries” (2018, 2).  Some of these intrinsic factors are present at the moment when an organism becomes a new individual (which they note may not be well-defined for all organisms). The degree to which these factors explain a phenotype is to be measured using Northcott’s (2013) theory of degrees of causal explanation.