The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" were of some importance in the discussion of free will in moral philosophy. In …show more content…
Franz Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen years. In this study he established that in any given population, biology, language, material and symbolic culture, are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another.
The tool of twin studies was developed after World War I as an experimental setup intended to exclude all confounders based on inherited behavioral traits. Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental