  This Nativist connection to evolution raises a natural question: why did the resurgence of Nativism have to wait for Chomskyan linguistics; why didn’t the theory of evolution, developed more than a half-century earlier, undermine Empiricism and resurrect Nativism? The Empiricist paradigm, after all, has always promoted itself in terms of its very austere view of human knowers: we perceive the world, and learn all we know on the basis of our perceptual experience of it. But as we noted earlier, the Darwinian Revolution made it plain that as a general rule, evolutionary forces shape organisms to fit into their niche. Such shaping, at least in the animal kingdom, was obviously a matter of pre-organizing the animal’s behavior-producing machinery—the processing that goes on in its brain—so that, for example, birds know that they should eat worms and build nests out of twigs and not vice versa. No one tries to explain the bird’s competences (and birds’ natural competences extend far beyond this trivial example) purely in terms of the bird’s perceptual experience. Birds are not blank slates at birth. But we humans grow from the same evolutionary branches as the animals around us. This line of thought leaves us with a few possibilities. One is that all the innate preparedness painstakingly established in our evolutionary ancestors was somehow discarded, and we humans were redesigned—from scratch, as it were—as blank slates with a uniquely powerful learning capability to make up for our meager initial holdings. This is, arguably, the traditional Empiricist approach. Another is that we inherited a good deal of what evolution had established in the cognitive systems of the organisms from which we evolved, but that our further advance was, to a first approximation, based not on innate factors but on learning. A third view—the Nativist position—is that more was added in the course of our own evolution, and that we too are in some way pre-informed about at least some matters most critical for our survival. These possibilities are too vague to be taken as hypotheses, but the Nativist view seems at least as initially plausible as the Empiricist approach. The important point is that it should have been that plausible a century ago. Somehow the Nativist implications of evolutionary theorizing were also  obscured.[5] Empiricists might argue that these implications are not relevant to the Nativist tradition that they oppose, but the point is that the issue was hardly raised. One suspects that a deep cultural and intellectual bias was at work.[6]