How Biological Is Essentialism?

Abstract

One of the most striking qualities of living things is their constancy over variation, both variation over time and variation over individuals. Thus a newborn infant becomes an adult, a sprout becomes an apple tree, a caterpillar turns into a butterfly—and these are not just accidental, idiosyncratic changes but ones that characterizes the life history of each and every adult human, apple tree, or butterfly. Similarly a hummingbird, ostrich, falcon, and sparrow differ to an extraordinary degree from one to another, yet they all share certain core properties that allow us to say that they are all birds (and that bats are not). An intuitive notion of ''essence " has been posited to account for how humans understand this constancy. According to this view, humans are predisposed to notice that members of a biological kind have a hidden essence that remains unchanged across outward changes such as growth and reproduction (Atran 1990; Pinker 1994). It is thus perhaps not surprising that essentialism has been argued to be a central component of folkbiology, along with structured taxonomies (Atran 1990; Berlin 1978) and causal explanatory frameworks (chapter 11, this volume). We resist tying essentialism too closely to folkbiology, however, for several reasons. First, the notion has a long history of links to other domains, and indeed much of the evidence for essentialism comes from outside the domain of folkbiology. People appear to attribute hidden essences to social categories such as race, gender, and personality (see