Abstract
Essentialism in philosophy is the position that things, especially kinds of things, have essences, or sets of properties, that all members of the kind must have, and the combination of which only members of the kind do, in fact, have. It is usually thought to derive from classical Greek philosophy and in particular from Aristotle’s notion of “what it is to be” something. In biology, it has been claimed that pre-evolutionary views of living kinds, or as they are sometimes called, “natural kinds”, are essentialist. This static view of living things presumes that no transition is possible in time or form between kinds, and that variation is regarded as accidental or inessential noise rather than important information about taxa. In contrast it is held that Darwinian, and post-Darwinian, biology relies upon variation as important and inevitable properties of taxa, and that taxa are not, therefore, kinds but historical individuals. Recent attempts have been made to undercut this account, and to reinstitute essentialism in biological kind terms. Others argue that essentialism has not ever been a historical reality in biology and its predecessors. In this chapter, I shall outline the many meanings of the notion of essentialism in psychology and social science as well as science, and discuss pro- and anti-essentialist views, and some recent historical revisionism. It turns out that nobody was essentialist to speak of in the sense that is antievolutionary in biology, and that much confusion rests on treating the one word, “essence” as meaning a single notion when in fact there are many. I shall also discuss the philosophical implications of essentialism, and what that means one way or the other for evolutionary biology. Teaching about evolution relies upon narratives of change in the ways the living world is conceived by biologists. This is a core narrative issue.
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- 1.
Nominalism in metaphysics is the view that only individual things exist, and no universal kinds. See below.
- 2.
- 3.
In the mid-nineteenth century, it is used in a philosophical context and also a medical context in German, on occasion, but not in our sense.
- 4.
- 5.
I am indebted to Larissa Vasiliyeva for bringing this to my attention, through an advance copy of her forthcoming paper in Botanica Pacifica with Steven Stephenson (2012).
- 6.
It is widely accepted that there are three kinds of classification philosophies in modern biology. One is called “phenetics”, and it relies on mathematically measuring similarities of arbitrarily chosen traits. It was replaced in most instances by “cladistics”, which draws treelike diagrams to represent relations based on shared or unique homologies. Process cladists think that these treelike diagrams (cladograms) represent the history of the evolution of the taxa, while pattern cladists think they are merely statements of relationship that might have been evolved in any number of historical pathways. The third view is misleadingly called “evolutionary systematics” (misleading because none of the other views are unevolutionary). It holds that classification is both genealogical (tracing treelike pathways in evolution) and “grade-based”, in which groups are put together on the basis of evolutionary novelties like flight or skeletal structures. These novelties represent grades of organization or evolution. For that reason it is sometimes called “gradism”.
- 7.
“The three essentialistic tenets of typology are (1) the ontological assertion that Forms exist, (2) the methodological assertion that the task of taxonomy as a science is to discern the essences of species, and (3) the logical assertion concerning definition” (Hull 1965b, p. 317).
- 8.
Contra Hull (1976, p.179n. 4).
- 9.
Putnam had argued in his 1975 that the meaning of kind terms did not depend on reference to the constituents of instances of that kind, by a “Twin Earth” thought experiment, in which everything was the same as on our Earth except that “water” denoted a substance XYZ not H2O. The point was that such general meanings of terms were established by a set of macrolevel properties, not the microlevel ones. Mill’s discussion (III.vi.1) of the nature of water is the ancestor of modern theories of emergence, which are only tangential to our topic.
- 10.
According to the Platonist view, classification had to proceed by dichotomous, or binary, division, hence “diairesis” or “splitting into two”. They achieved this by defining things as being some property, or not being it. Aristotle, on the other hand, allowed for groups to be subdivided into many subsets, all of which had to have their own positive definienda (see Wilkins 2009b).
- 11.
E.g., Metaphysics 1022a22, Categories X, Posterior Analytics, I.4; on necessary properties see Metaphysics Z.4, Topics 102a3, Posterior Analytics, 73a34-5 cf. Cohen (2009).
- 12.
Contrary to the received opinion, special creationism as an alternative to evolutionary science is a fairly modern development. First proposed by George Macready Price, a Seventh Day Adventist, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, special “scientific” creationism was introduced onto the wider stage of American discourse in the 1960s. The period Price was writing was one of great turmoil in evolutionary opinion (Numbers 2006).
- 13.
Gasking (p5f) made the following comment about biological species:
“For our next example consider the symmetrical and non-transitive relation crossable with, defined as follows: Two local populations of plants or animals are said to be ‘crossable’ if they interbreed freely in nature, or would do so but for geographical or ecological barriers. 2 (It is a matter of biological fact that this relation is non-transitive. There do occur in nature series of populations where A is crossable with B, B with C, and C with D, but where A is not crossable with D.) On the basis of this non-transitive relation we can define the transitive relation serially crossable with. In terms of this, taking a local population as focus, we can define the chain-group as all those populations that are serially crossable with this population. In so doing we define a ‘biological species’ 3 – for between any two populations belonging to the same biological species there holds the chain-group relation serially crossable with.”
Gasking’s distinction showed Hull that simply grouping things, in this case living things, into sets did not imply all the logical relations that usually are drawn from talking about classes, such as transitivity. Given Gasking’s previous comment that sets do not become (p.1) but are timeless, he clearly thinks that to be a species is a time-indexed relation; one shares the property of being the same species at a particular time t. This obviously raises a problem for species evolution, even if he permits them to be clusters.
- 14.
Part of this section was previously published as section 7 of Wilkins (2013).
- 15.
Some have proposed “cryptic species” or “pseudospecies” for taxa that lack their own distinguishing properties. I think that if they truly lacked all unique properties, they would not even be distinct species; even if we do not know the causes of differentiation, the organisms certainly do, in the sense that they react physically when the right properties exist and not otherwise.
- 16.
Not unrelated to the identically named problem in social history (Dussel 1993), in which the linear idea of history always moves from simple or immature to complex or mature. An example of a developmentalist fallacy can be found in Piagetian “genetic epistemology”, which is often take to represent a historical process in individual development.
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Wilkins, J.S. (2013). Essentialism in Biology. In: Kampourakis, K. (eds) The Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6537-5_19
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