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Limitations of Natural Kind Talk in the Life Sciences: Homology and Other Cases

  • Thematic Issue Article: Natural Kinds: New Dawn?
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Abstract

The aim of this article is to detail some reservations against the beliefs, claims, or presuppositions that current essentialist natural kind concepts (including homeostatic property cluster kinds) model grouping practices in the life sciences accurately and generally. Such concepts fit reasoning into particular preconceived epistemic and semantic patterns. The ability of these patterns to fit scientific practice is often argued in support of homeostatic property cluster accounts, yet there are reasons to think that in the life sciences kind concepts exhibit a diversity of grouping practices that are flattened out by conceptualizing them as natural kinds. Instead this article argues that the process of understanding grouping practices needs to start from a more neutral position independent of any ontological account. Following Love (Acta Biotheor 57:51–75, 2009) this paper suggests that typical natural kind concepts should be broached in the first place as grouping strategies that use a variety of semantic and epistemic tactics to apply group-bound information to tasks of explanation and understanding.

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Notes

  1. “Natural Kinds in Philosophy and in the Life Sciences: Scholastic Twilight or New Dawn?” Joint workshop of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Altenberg, Austria) and the Department of Philosophy I, University of Granada (Spain); University of Granada; Sept. 7–9, 2011.

  2. Ellis-type natural kinds insist on strict necessary and sufficient conditions of distinct intrinsic properties and relations (Ellis 2001). More generally I take an “essentialist natural kind” concept to be one that poses a set of necessary conditions for an element to belong in the extension of a kind. I do not insist on sufficiency conditions, which are often not demanded as much in the literature, even by Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975); see Reydon (2009) for a discussion of the flaws of talking about natural kinds this way. Note that when I refer in this article to “natural kind theory” I refer to essentialist theory.

  3. Homeostatic property cluster conceptions of natural kinds are generally thought of as instances of essentialist natural kinds. Developed by Boyd (1999a, b), they are considered in life science circles as better adapted to inductive and explanatory reasoning within the life sciences. They achieve this by relaxing the condition that a natural kind be defined by a fixed set of properties (rare in the biological world). Rather, a natural kind is defined by a property cluster, subsets of which are instantiated by any kind member. These properties co-occur over time and space because of homeostatic mechanisms that ensure that properties continue to cluster even if the properties change. These mechanisms ensure the class will be projectable.

  4. Taxometric methods were originally introduced into psychopathology by Meehl (1995) as a method of determining the “latent structure of constructs,” in this case disease constructs. A “construct” is a word for any complex psychological concepts like particular mental diseases but also concepts like “love,” “fear,” and “intelligence.” The latent structure refers to whether or not parameters defining that disease or other concept are related dimensionally or categorically. In the former case parameters of psychological subjects vary along a continuum to the extent which they have the disease. As a result one can have more or less of the disease. In the latter case the method reveals a bounded set of parameter values that identify those that have the disease and those that don’t, allowing for some inexactness. This suggests the latent structure of the construct is categorical.

  5. Wagner (1989a, b) originally argued that shared developmental constraints alone could be used to infer common ancestry for a structure, but Rieppel (1992) strongly replied that to make such an inference the constraints themselves would have to be mapped cladistically. However, in Wagner (1999) the role of phylogenetics had been incorporated into his analysis. The use of established trees is in fact a common part of practice in evolutionary developmental biology.

  6. A symplesiomorphy is a trait that is shared between two or more taxa, but is also shared with other taxa that have an earlier last common ancestor with the taxa under consideration. Parallelisms are traits arising independently in different lineages. A recurrent trait is a trait that disappears and reappears sporadically amongst related taxa.

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Acknowledgments

This work was generously funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. I also acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation REESE grant DRL097394084. I would like to thank Thomas Reydon, Werner Callebaut and two anonymous reviewers for their help editing and revising this paper.

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  1. School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Miles MacLeod

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MacLeod, M. Limitations of Natural Kind Talk in the Life Sciences: Homology and Other Cases. Biol Theory 7, 109–120 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-012-0079-6

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