A newborn fawn gets up and starts walking around in a few hours. Either he learned in a short time that the universe is 3 rather than 199 dimensions, or he already had that knowledge essentially encoded at birth. Big deal Kant. Actually, big deal scientists (forgiving all the additional detail I'm sure is in those papers).
I find it curious that the writers would reference Kant on this. Surely it's a signalling explanation rather than as a true causal precedent of their research.
Big deal Kant.
It may seem obvious now, but someone still had to think of it, and the first person to do that was Kant. This seems analogous to complaining that Newton only did first-year stuff. And we still call it Newtonian mechanics, even if lots of 19th century mathematicians eventually did it better than Newton.
I'm a bit surprised at how little love Kant gets in these comments -- sure he didn't correctly solve the problem of how knowledge relates to experience, but he was the first one to make any useful progress on it at all.
I've often wished for a list of cases where philosophy has proven useful, or has at least anticipated science in drawing correct conclusions. Here's one for the list:
The June 18 2010 Science has two very similar articles on how rat brains represent space. Both conclude that the brain already represents space as a grid before rat pups take their first steps into the world. Both make the point that this validates Kant's claim that space is an innate concept prior to experience.
(The next task is to make a corresponding list of cases where philosophers made incorrect conclusions; and estimate whether the number of correct conclusions is greater than chance.)