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What is a species? Essences and generation

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Abstract

Arguments against essentialism in biology rely strongly on a claim that modern biology abandoned Aristotle’s notion of a species as a class of necessary and sufficient properties. However, neither his theory of essentialism, nor his logical definition of species and genus (eidos and genos) play much of a role in biological research and taxonomy, including his own. The objections to natural kinds thinking by early twentieth century biologists wrestling with the new genetics overlooked the fact that species have typical developmental cycles and most have a large shared genetic component. These are the “what-it-is-to-be” members of that species. An intrinsic biological essentialism does not commit us to Aristotelian notions, nor even modern notions, of essence. There is a long-standing definition of “species” and its precursor notions that goes back to the Greeks, and which Darwin and pretty well all biologists since him share, that I call the Generative Conception of Species. It relies on there being a shared generative power that makes progeny resemble parents. The “what-it-is-to-be” a member of that species is that developmental type, mistakes in development notwithstanding. Moreover, such “essences” have always been understood to include deviations from the type. Finally, I shall examine some implications of the collapse of the narrative about essences in biology.

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Notes

  1. As I am focusing on species rather than much higher taxa, it is an open question whether there still was essentialism at the level of, say, kingdoms, but even here I would say there is considerable vagueness, with, for example, so-called “zoophytes” and the like; e.g., Bonnet (1745), cf. Pallas (1766), who is a critic of the Great Chain approach, and the first to mention a tree metaphor for the division between plants and animals. Even for him, though, zoophytes are a kind of transition between kingdoms. Gradual transitions were the norm at all levels of taxonomy.

  2. It is also used for chemical, mineralogical, and other physical kinds. In addition it has a special meaning in psychology, theology, philosophy and even in coinage.

  3. Some early thinkers, such as John Ray (1696) do explicitly appeal to the genus-including-species schema of logic, but they then proceed to employ it quite differently in their taxonomic work.

  4. Phillip Sloan (2009) calls this species for the historical and material sense of species (cf. Kung 1977).

  5. I am greatly indebted to Jody Hey for asking me when the use of “species problem” began, leading me to notice this shift.

  6. I am, therefore, disagreeing with Dupre (2001) that they were first units of classification. However, he is correct that they were not units of any theory of biology when they were introduced.

  7. Even Linnaeus distinguished between characters and notae; effectively between diagnostic marks and real properties.

  8. It is the topic of a forthcoming paper of mine on natural kinds in biology.

  9. The difference between Mill and the Aristotelian project of science by definition is that Mill expected these properties to be causally active or constitutive.

  10. And to not share them would mean that no taxon could be identified in any case. If there is a taxon, there must be some shared general properties.

  11. , e.g., Top. A.5, 101b39, E.3, 153a15–16, Met Δ.6, 1016a33 (Baum 2009). The term “essentia” was a Latin backformation.

  12. The philosophical account that best represents this is Richard Boyd’s notion of a homeostatic property cluster, or HPC, kind (Boyd 1999). It works, I think, for the most basal kind, but I do not think it applies to supraspecific kinds.

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Acknowledgements

This work was done under the ARC Federation Fellowship FF0457917 of Prof. Paul Griffiths, and under ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant DP0984826, at the Universities of Queensland and Sydney, respectively. Many thanks to Ciências Viva, and the Faculdade de Ciências of the Universidade de Lisboa for inviting me to Lisbon to deliver the talk this paper is based upon and funding that visit, and to Dr Nathalie Gontier for hosting an Australian above and beyond the call of duty.

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    John S. Wilkins

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Wilkins, J.S. What is a species? Essences and generation. Theory Biosci. 129, 141–148 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-010-0090-z

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