Innately Innate Innateness

I have serious issues with the word "innate". Humans bandy it about as the bright and shiny difference between ourselves and everything else on the planet. We're different because we have "innately human" abilities--things we're born with that we needn't learn to do and that we do better than anything else that ever lived. Chimpanzees? Well they don't have any innate abilities except perhaps for poo slinging. It seems to be that this innate humanity is directly linked to our possession of a soul, language, and morality, qualities not existing in other animals. You know we're animals, right? I hope you do, reader, however I can't help but think proponents of this innately human thing would probably prefer to forget that link... we're human, bygad! not wild creatures! (oh and I also think it's ridiculous we think we're the only ones with souls/language... but another time)

In any case. Nothing is innate. You are not born knowing how to do things. And no, innate abilities are not propensities you are born with that you later develop, it is knowing how to do things out of the womb. I'll be lame and quote Merriam and Webster: "originating in or arising from the intellect or the constitution of the mind, rather than learned through experience". So unless we're talking about breathing or blinking, you're not born knowing how to do much.

Everything else is learned. Abilities like playing an instrument or sport, arguing theory, administering and interpreting research, judging morality and acting on those judgments are all learned! If you take away all of our fancy environment we've created for ourselves, if you strip us down to the bare essentials, we're not going to be highly moral creatures debating the meaning of life with an advanced language.

If you look at primates, they have hierarchies and behavior that appears to be moral (not going to use that word altruistic to describe it), but what it comes down to is trying to live in harmony in a social structure. Living in groups is beneficial to most primates' fitness, especially the higher order ones with large brains, like us. So we can look to their example to see what we'd be like without our technology, language, and culture. We'd form hierarchical societies where certain things were ok to do and others weren't, but those rights and wrongs would be dictated by the action's effect on the group's (and your own) fitness, not whether or not it adhered to the very cerebral concept of morality. If you steal a higher-up's food, he'll punish you. Not because it's immoral to steal, but because it's his food, he's bigger and stronger, and you taking his food harms his fitness, so back off!

Of course it's very hard to prove any of this. You can't steal a child away from its parents and raise it in a silent environment to see if it develops its own language or if it is mute (though you'd think deaf people who aren't taught to speak would be proof...), you can't maroon a bunch of infants on an island and see what kind of society would result, but you can think rationally about what would likely happen. Take away all of your personal bias for your own species and really think about what we'd be like if we didn't have all our little tricks. We'd be just another higher order primate. Give our current primates enough time, and a complete lack of human contact, and I wouldn't doubt that they'd eventually develop into some sort of species analogous to our own: with complicated language, elevated thought, and culture.

Humans. Really the world'd be much better off without us and our immeasurable self-conceit.