Garbage In - Garbage Out

I don't think I've ever heard it called  "empiricism versus rationalism", but I may be familiar with the argument. Is it anything like "nature versus nurture"? People have been arguing that one for a long time too, and I don't know why, because the obvious answer is that both are necessary to make us what we are. Mozart was playing the violin at the age of three and composing music by the time he was five. He obviously had a genetic predisposition for musical talent but, if he had not been exposed to music at an early age, it's doubtful that he would have developed his talent so quickly. I don't think it could happen in the real world but, even a Mozart would not likely develop musical skills if he lived his whole life in isolation and was never exposed to music. Even mathematics, the "pure" science, was certainly not developed by a single person working in isolation.

During World War II, it was discovered that Eskimos and Indians had a genetic predisposition for reading a RADAR screen. Nobody knew this previously because none of these guys had previously been exposed to RADAR. The technology was pretty new at the time, and not everybody was able to grasp it. When they started building military bases in the far north, they found that the natives were really good at it, but they still needed a certain amount of training to get them started.

Do you know anything about feral children? You know, like Tarzan, only for real. I have read a little about it, and I once saw a thing on TV, but that was a long time ago. In mythology and fiction these kids were always raised by wolves or apes, but I don't remember the few real life cases saying anything about that. There was a kid in France that they found wandering around and were able to rehabilitate him to certain point, but he reached a ceiling and couldn't progress any further. They didn't know anything about his background, so they couldn't tell if his limitations were inborn or acquired. There is a theory that, with some skills, if you don't learn them by a certain age, you're never going to learn them, but I don't know whether or not that has ever been proven. I don't think it would be possible for a kid to survive infancy without human contact. Being raised by wolves or apes is an interesting concept, but I don't think it's ever been proven to have happened in real life. There have been cases of apes being raised by humans, and we all like to anthropomorphize our dogs and cats but, truth be known, you can only take an animal so far. Then again, that's true of humans too, isn't it. Some are fast learners, some are slow learners, and some individuals can go farther than others, but they all have their limitations.

The point of this ramble is that it is unlikely for any complex thing to have come solely from the logical mind of a single person. You've got to have inputs before you can have outputs and, even then, there is no guarantee that the outputs will be worth a hill of beans.