Resurrecting biological essentialism
Philosophy of Science 75 (3):344-382 (2008)
| Abstract | The article defends the doctrine that Linnaean taxa, including species, have essences that are, at least partly, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. The consensus among philosophers of biology is that such essentialism is deeply wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. I argue that biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behavior of species require structural explanations that must advert to these essential properties. The objection that, according to current “species concepts,” species are relational is rejected. These concepts are primarily concerned with what it is for a kind to be a species and throw little light on the essentialist issue of what it is for an organism to be a member of a particular kind. Finally, the article argues that this essentialism can accommodate features of Darwinism associated with variation and change. *Received August 2007; revised May 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Program, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016; e-mail: mdevitt@gc.cuny.edu . Essentialism about species is today a dead issue. (Sober [1980] 1992 , 249) Folk essentialism is both false and fundamentally inconsistent with the Darwinian view of species. (Griffiths 2002 , 72). | |||||||||
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