Since the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) it has been presumed that humans and other species by extension are not born as clean slates, but rather that they are endowed with a mechanism for the storage of knowledge, which comes about through brain-mediated learning (Hebb 1949). In interpreting the philosophy of Kant, Jiang (2025) entertains the following scenario: A group of individuals is stranded on an island. After falling asleep, they awaken with no memory of past events. Would these individuals be able to survive on the island? A clean-slate outcome would render the inhabitants unable to survive. A functioning brain, however, would have the inhabitants learn to discriminate between edible and non-edible items. As learning progresses, new knowledge would be put into memory.

Biology supports this:

“Yerkes (1912) trained an earthworm to choose one arm of a T-maze, using electric shock as punishment for error and the moist burrow as reward for correct choice. The habit was acquired in twenty trials, 2 days at ten trials per day, about what might be necessary for the laboratory rat. No errors were made on the third day, though the behaviour was somewhat inconsistent in the following week as between good days and bad days (even worms have them). Yerkes then removed the brain, or principal ganglia, by cutting off the head—the anterior four and a half segments. The animal continued to respond correctly, showing that there were sufficient synaptic modifications in the remaining ganglia to mediate the response—until the new head regenerated, at which time the habit was lost. The noise generated by the new ganglia, the irrelevant neural activity of the uneducated brain, was sufficient to disrupt learning completely.” (Hebb 1961, p. 78)

In the foregoing, the new brain cells of the worm had to be reprogrammed by the feedback coming from the new environment, which concurs with the idea of Kant that organisms are not born as clean slates. Chomsky’s universal grammar has been proposed to explain why humans learn language so fast as children (Chomsky 1965). We would posit that all animals are endowed with a ‘universal grammar’ of brain function to provide every species with a constitution that anticipates environmental contingencies. Humans have a universal grammar for language as well as for building advanced societies; Sperm whales have a universal grammar for communicating between members of a pod; Zebra Finch have a universal grammar for the generation of songs to attract mates; and Compass termites have a universal grammar for the construction of above-ground nests that are inundated with tunnels so workers and soldiers can defend the queen and king.