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Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Elliott Sober
Elliott Sober*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Abstract

Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called “population thinking”. In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems are often taken to be the decisive reason for thinking that essentialism is untenable. However, according to the view of essentialism I suggest, this familiar objection is not fatal to essentialism. It is rather the essentialist's use of what I call the natural state model for explaining variation which clashes with evolutionary theory. This model implemented the essentialist's requirement that properties of populations be defined in terms of properties of member organisms. Requiring such constituent definitions is reductionistic in spirit; additionally, evolutionary theory shows that such definitions are not available, and, moreover, that they are not needed to legitimize population-level concepts. Population thinking involves the thesis that population concepts may be legitimized by showing their connections with each other, even when they are not reducible to concepts applying at lower levels of organization. In the paper, I develop these points by describing Aristotle's ideas on the origins of biological variation; they are a classic formulation of the natural state model. I also describe how the development of statistical ideas in the 19th century involved an abandoning of the natural state model.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 350 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Suggestions made by William Coleman, James Crow, Joan Kung, David Hull, Geoffrey Joseph, Steven Kimbrough, Richard Lewontin, Ernst Mayr, Terrence Penner, William Provine, Robert Stauffer, Dennis Stampe and Victor Hilts helped me considerably in writing this paper.

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