Abstract
In the last chapter an attempt was made to show that Scholastic metaphysical principles can be deployed to provide a plausible theory of individuation for living entities, particularly individual organisms. Meeting this challenge in a plausible fashion is crucial because of the pivotal role individual organisms play within evolutionary theory in general. I now move on to consider a particular feature of individual organisms, namely, the fact that organisms undergo a variety of changes. In fact evolutionary theory, as the name itself suggests, is deeply committed to the view that virtually no aspect of the Tree of Life is stable. It is not just that individual organisms undergo changes throughout their careers; different kinds of individuals have appeared on the scene in the great evolutionary transitions. It is also the case that the Tree of Life has changed as species come into and pass out of existence in speciation and extinction events.
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Notes
This aporia exists for anyone who takes evolutionary biology and contemporary metaphysics seriously. Few scientific theories enjoy the prestige of evolutionary biology. Stearns and Hoekstra rightly insist that ‘The ideas of evolution have survived many controversies and tests and are now considered as reliable as any ideas in science’. Evolution: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University, 2005, p. 23).
Ruth Barcan-Marcus — see her ‘Essentialism in Modal Logic’ and ‘Essential Attribution’ in Modalities: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)
Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and World (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1975)
Kit Fine, ‘Postscript’, in Worlds, Times and Selves in Fine and Prior (eds), (London: Duckworth, 1977)
David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Graeme Forbes, ‘Essentialism’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Hale and Wright (eds). (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, pp. 515–533).
It is not for nothing that Lawson-Tancred deemed Aristotle’s ‘the received metaphysics of the Western world’. In Aristotle, Metaphysics. Translation by Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 2004, p. xxiii).
This argument is found in Ernst Mayr, ‘Darwin and the Evolutionary Theory in Biology’, Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal, Meggers (ed.), (Washington DC: Anthropology Society of Washington, 1959)
David Hull, ‘The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy: Two Thousand Years of Stasis. Part 1’, Br. J. Philos. Sci., (1965), XVI: 1–18.
M. T. Ghiselin (1981) ‘Categories, Life and Thinking’, Behav. Brain Sci, (1981): 4, 269–283
For an expression of this argument see Samir Okasha, ‘Darwinian Metaphysics: Species and the Question of Essentialism’, Synthese, (2002): 131, 191–213.
See Eliot Sober, ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, Phil. of Sci., (1980): 47, 350–383.
See R. Bernier, ‘The Species as an Individual: Facing Essentialism’, Systematic Zoology, (1984): 33(4), 467.
‘Logical Difference and Biological Difference: The Unity of Aristotle’s Thought’, in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, Lennox and Gotthelf (eds), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Balme, Aristotle’s de Partibus Animalium and De Generatione Animalium I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
Lennox, ‘Material and Formal Natures in Aristotle’s de Partibus Animalium’ and ‘Kinds, Forms of Kinds, and the More and the Less in Aristotle’s Biology’, in Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Walsh, ‘Evolutionary Essentialism’, Brit. J. Phil. Sci., 57 (2006): 431.
It is worth noting that geneticists are becoming increasingly comfortable with developmental programmes and using the notion to make discriminations between species. For an extended discussion of the biological details see chapter 6 of Stearns and Hoekstra’s Evolution: An Introduction, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). That developmental programmes might be the key to distinguishing biological species was raised over 30 years ago by King and Wilson in their ‘Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees’ Science, 188, 1975: 107–166. Then the suggestion was used to account for the paradoxical fact that genetically human and chimpanzees are very similar while phenotypically very different. This suggestion has now received empirical support from various studies. The work of Khaitovich and Pä ä bo on primate gene expression offers a particularly clear example of how species specific variation in gene expression is now taken to be the distinguishing feature of a species. In particular see Philip Khaitovich, Wolfgang Enard, Michael Lachmann, Svante Pääbo, ‘Evolution of Primate Gene Expression’, Nature Reviews Genetics, 7, 2006: 693–702
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© 2013 Stephen Boulter
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Boulter, S. (2013). Evolutionary Biology, Change and Essentialism. In: Metaphysics from a Biological Point of View. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322821_6
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