The Essentialism Story

Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull.

The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural kinds such as species as being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. That is, to be a member of a species, an organism has to have all the right properties. After Darwin, goes the story, “population thinking”, which denies that there are such necessary properties.

Polly (she prefers to be so called) argues that this was based on Mayr’s hatred of Plato, Hull’s reading of Popper, and Cain’s dismissal of Aristotle. In fact, she (and I) think that systematics practice was not at all based on metaphysics, but on good empiricism and she terms her replacement view “the empiricism story”. Recent work by Staffan Müller-Wille (in press) on Linnaeus verifies this – Linnaeus, who is supposed to be the bad boy with typological essentialism, in fact was pretty good at empirical observation. Polly also has another paper (2006a) on Linnaeus, pointing out what should be fairly obvious: Linnaeus never did Aristotelian classification by division.

It’s an interesting paper not online, unfortunately, as it deals with how scientists do history and why – it’s a “metahistory” paper. But what tickled my fancy more than anything else is that Polly cited my PhD dissertation. W00t!

Winsor, Mary P. 2006a. Linnaeus’ biology was not essentialist. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 93 (1):2–7.

Winsor, Mary P. 2006b. The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory. Hist. Phil. Life Sci. 28:149-174.