Is Reading An Innate Capacity, Like Speaking?

Whole language instruction is based on the premise that just as no one has to explicitly be taught to speak the mother tongue, reading is an innate capacity of the human brain.

I think the Whole Language enthusiasts are wrong, but maybe they aren't totally wrong:

One explanation for the greater difficulty of learning to read and write is that written language is only a few thousand years old, not enough time for innate systems for processing reading/writing to evolve. The neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene (2003) suggests that the reason we can learn to read and write is that written language makes use of visual recognition capabilities that are innate. The basic brain structures we use to recognize words also exist in the visual systems of primates, where they are used to recognize important objects—dangers and opportunities.