There was some discussion about Evolutionary Psychology during class the other night. Here's an article [1] that goes into more detail about what nativism means, and how it stacks up against other approaches to psychological explanation.

I've also included this chapter by Pinker called Reverse Engineering the Mind [2] in order to give you a general picture of where linguistics fits in the larger picture of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Here's a snip from the Pinker chapter:

The human mind poses a paradox: on one hand it is an engineering masterpiece — witness the slow progress in building robots to do every day tasks that we take for granted (see Dennett, this volume). On the other hand, the mind displays many apparent quirks and maladaptive features: disgust, superstitions and romantic love to name a few. To solve this puzzle, I suggest that the principles of reverse engineering, i.e., the attempt to understand how a structure works by asking what it is designed to do, should be applied to the mind. Much of research in anatomy and physiology has been the reverse engineering of the complex structures of the body, invoking the idea that each part was in some sense ‘designed’ for a particular function, e.g., the eye as an image-forming device. Biological design, as we currently understand it, arises as a result of evolution through natural selection. Applying this to the mind means studying its functions in terms of the evolutionary processes that created it. To do this we need to examine the selective pressures that were operating in the hunter–gatherer societies in which humans evolved.
Evolution is one of the three key ideas that I consider are needed to understand how the mind works. The second is that the function of the brain is the processing of information or computation, and the third that the mind is not a single organ but a system of organs of computation, each specialized for a particular perceptual, cognitive, emotional or motor function. Thus the mind is a system of organs of computation that allowed our ancestors to understand and get the better of objects, plants, animals and each other (Pinker, 1997). These ideas are not new and have been successfully applied in perception research but they have had little impact on large areas of psychology, such as the emotions, sexuality and humour. I elaborate this view by discussing examples from cognition, language and emotions about objects and people.