Abstract
The task of ascertaining whether and how human beings are unique presupposes that we know what human beings are: if we cannot identify human beings, we are unable to compare them against non-human beings. Traditionally, the answer to the question of what things are refers to their essences. However, for many decades since the 1950s, there has been a pervasive scepticism that any such essences exist, certainly for biological kinds, if not more broadly. Recently, there have been attempts to salvage biological essentialism, both by philosophers of biology and by neo-scholastic metaphysicians. In this paper, I argue that these attempts to defend biological essentialism are insufficient for the purposes of getting the quest for human uniqueness off the ground. From a theological standpoint, ‘human being’ should not be conflated with ‘Homo sapiens’.
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Notes
- 1.
As we shall see, definitional work often involves empirical investigation: that is, the distinction between knowing what something is and knowing what it is like is not a hard one. The movement between definition and description is iterative.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
To clarify, it is possible to be sceptical about some taxa, and not others. As we are most interested in Homo sapiens, we are most concerned with whether or not biological species form natural kinds. A nominalist about biological species might well be a realist about higher order taxa; she could certainly also be a realist about the distinction between living and non-living things.
- 5.
This is not to deny that the kind vs individual debate is an important and interesting one. For example, on the view that we need natural kinds to have laws of nature, the individualist view excludes species from being subjects of such laws (e.g. Lowe 2006). We might additionally want Homo sapiens to be subject to laws of nature, but that is a separate issue from the one currently under consideration.
- 6.
- 7.
This story appears in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book VI.20.
- 8.
By ‘rational’, Aristotle and his inheritors do not mean ‘reasonable’, if that just refers to a particular cognitive style. The common accusation against Aristotle’s definition, that it leaves out the intellectually disabled, is misguided by this errant conflation of a trait and the essence from which it flows. We shall return to this point later in considering neo-scholastic positions.
- 9.
- 10.
Oderberg (2007) makes this point in drawing the distinction between epistemological and ontological vagueness; he correctly notes that essentialism can only accept the former but not the latter.
- 11.
A comparison with music notes and colour categories might be useful here. There is not just one way to carve up sound wave frequencies and their corresponding pitches into pitch classes: different scales contain different numbers of pitch classes. Colour categorization seems to be more (but not entirely) psychologically universal, but even here, it is likely a contingent fact about how our eyes (e.g., rods, cones) and visual cortices (e.g., extended V4) work that determine how we categorize colours. There is, in other words, nothing special and objective – independent of us – about electromagnetic radiation with the wavelengths (approximately) 740nm and 625nm, such that they are objective boundaries. To most human beings under appropriate lighting conditions, these frequencies mark out the colour red, but that tells us more about human colour perception than about whether or not there is an objectively correct way to divide up a continuous colour spectrum into colour categories.
- 12.
Oderberg (2007) tries to recruit the reality of intermediate or transitional species for the cause of essentialism, and he would be right in saying that if there were such species then ‘there must be determinate [species] relative to which the indeterminacy is measured’. There are, however, so many intermediate species; there just seems to be us, observing as we do only extant biodiversity directly, and extinct biodiversity in patches only.
- 13.
As far as I know, only Devitt (2008: 374-375) explicitly deals with such cases, in his discussion of arbitrariness and anagenesis. He writes ‘Clearly, there would be a deal of arbitrariness about this choice. But we should not exaggerate how much’. It is not at all clear to me how he quantifies the amount of arbitrariness involved here.
- 14.
Proponents of this theory take issue with characterizing it as a saltationist view, but this seems to be a protest against mischaracterizations by creationists and intelligent design theorists. The theory of punctuated equilibrium is a saltationist view in that it is not a gradualist one.
- 15.
Both Eldredge (1985) and Ghiselin (1987) also consider the theory of punctuated equilibrium and the view of species as spatio-temporally bounded individuals as mutually reinforcing. For them, the periods of rapid change are where individual species begin and end. A similar view may also be found in Hull (1978).
- 16.
As I have mentioned earlier, however, Devitt is likely to disagree with me on this. I have not been able to adjudicate the disagreement (see footnote 6).
- 17.
Mayden (1997) distinguishes between these, and also describes three phylogenetic species concepts. These differences are not significant for our purposes.
- 18.
This provides a response to my charge of arbitrariness: we are not the prototypical H. sapiens, just the most recent in the lineage.
- 19.
This is reminiscent of Feser’s (2014) arguments, above. This is no coincidence, as Feser credits Oderberg as a major influence.
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Jong, J. (2017). What Are Human Beings (That You Are Mindful of Them)? Notes from Neo-Darwinsim and Neo-Aristotelianism. In: Fuller, M., Evers, D., Runehov, A., Sæther, KW. (eds) Issues in Science and Theology: Are We Special?. Issues in Science and Religion: Publications of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62124-1_6
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