Four hundred years of instinct controversy

Most issues of the instinct controversy were defined in the seventeenth century. Eighteenth-century French enlightenment was vigorous in rejecting the instinct concept but Reimarus demonstrated its validity. The advance of natural theology, and later of Darwinism, led to wide acceptance of instinct in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth witnessed a revival of anti-instinct attitudes on the eighteenth-century model. Extraneous influences still impede recognition of scientific evidence for the importance of innately determined behavior.