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SYSTEMATIC BIOLOGY
DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syr112
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Book Review
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SYSTEMATIC BIOLOGY
Article doi
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DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syr112
Article title
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Book Review
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John S. Wilkins
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John S. Wilkins
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Book Review
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as well as philosophically inclined systematists. It offers a useful corrective to the standard textbook story of how everything was Aristotelian or Platonist before Darwin, and how Darwin freed us from the strictures of the Greek eidos;, but the book is not, I think, as free of that approach itself as it might be. In what follows, I Over the past 50 years, since the sesquicentenary of shall make some slight and amicable criticisms, which I Charles Darwin’s birth, there has been a story about the hope will not put anyone off reading Richards’ book. It often appears from a philosophical point of view concept of species that has become the received view amongst biologists and philosophers alike. Historians that what philosophers think about kinds, species, and Polly Winsor, Gordon McOuat, Ron Amundson, and my- forms is very largely a matter of language. A philosoself, among others, have attempted to deflate this story, pher will talk about the “essence” of a “tiger” or an which we call the “essentialism story” (McOuat 2001; “elm,”, with no consideration given to the actual biolWinsor 2003, 2006a,b; Amundson 2005; Wilkins 2009a,b). ogy involved. Richards carefully focuses upon the biWhat has been lacking, however, has been a post-essentialistology, but in so doing he, and others he is reporting, philosophical interpretation of the like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, tend to equate the species concept, which is what this recent book by claims made in philosophy of language and the subject of biology. However, it seems to me that there is a bit of Richard Richards undertakes to provide. According to the essentialism story, before Darwin philosophical kit available, which has been available for worked his magic upon our thinking a species was a very long time, that might clear up some of the confutreated as a natural kind, which is defined by the pos- sion: John Locke’s distinction between the “real essence,”, session among its members of some set of necessary and which is the (to Locke unknowable) causal powers that sufficient properties: its essence (Hull 1965; Kitts D.B. cause things to be what they are, and the “nominal and Kitts D.J. 1979; Okasha 2002; Levit and Meister 2006; essence,”, which is the definitional properties of terms Bird 2009). Now, “essence” is a term with a wide array that we apply to these things. Locke is famous for havof meanings and histories, but for 50 years philosophers ing said that we can know only nominal essences. Some recent accounts of species, such as the “homehave equated it with the claim that there is a “species nature”, and argued that this conception of species is ostatic property cluster” account of Richard Boyd, and fundamentally in conflict with Darwinian evolution and others discussed in the meaty Chapter 6 of Richards’ book, seem to attempt to straddle this distinction. The population thinking (Sober 1980; O’Hara 1997). Richards attacks this historical story, as have others, meaning of the word or concept “species” is that it is a but he goes further. After presenting the historical con- kind causally held together by some set of powers, or siderations in the first four chapters, comprising 112 as a biologist would say, by developmental, ecological, pages of the book, Richards then overviews the current and phylogenetic properties and processes. But there is philosophical views in the fifth chapter, which consid- a considerable amount of vacillation between our diagers the philosophical views of those biologists who have nostic definitions of species (observations of morphology, written on the topic, such as Rick Mayden, Ed Wiley, molecular sequences, and ecological behaviours) and the Brent Mishler, and Michael Donoghue, as well as the causal explanations of those observations. This broadly philosopher commentators. The subsequent chapters equates to Locke’s “nominal” and “real” essentialism. cover philosophical topics: the metaphysics (Chapter 6) For example, DNA Barcodingbar coding is clearly a diand semantics (Chapter 7) of species concepts. Chapter agnostic conception of “species” — —nobody thinks that the cox1 gene causes species to be distinct. However, the 8 summarizes the philosophical conclusions. If the historical basis for the essentialism story is taxonomic inflation caused by such single-gene diagnoses wrong, what about these philosophical issues? Biologists suggests that sometimes the difference between diagnoand might think them irrelevant to the practice of system- sis atics, and in everyday terms they probably are, but af- cause is being overlooked. If the gene is merely a diagter all it was biologists like Ernst Mayr who raised the nostic essence, then we had better not presume that it matter in the first place. In this book, Richards sets up is a real essence as well. When the diagnosis oversplits 100 taxa, perhaps we need to reality check our diagnoses. the problems well, and motivates them from both the biological and the philosophical standpoints. The book 50 Richards’ discussion of essentialism, with which I gives the usual story in good detail, and at a level that mostly concur, does not consider such matters. Instead, could be profitably read by upper level undergraduates he adopts the previous distinctions of essence = class The Species Problem: aA Philosophical Analysis.— Richard A. Richards, editor. 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge2010. x+236 pp. ISBN 9780-521-19683-3. £50 $85 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-511-776397. $68 (eBook).
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and nominalism = species individualism, settling in the end for the latter. Given the final (seventh) chapter about the philosophy of language and the meaning of kind terms (which might be of interest only to the philosophers, not to the systematists), I would have expected more discussion about that issue. This is quite apart from the question of whether kind terms are necessarily about definitional classes (I think not), which is what most people think of as essentialism. I believe that this is in fact a wrong characterization of the role that “essence” and cognates have played in biology, although it may have played out in philosophy. One response to this standard view, in fact the source for much of it, is Michael Ghiselin’s well-known thesis called “species individualism” (Ghiselin 1974). According to this view, widely adopted by philosophers and biologists until recently, a species is not a class or kind, but a historical individual. No laws or universal generalizations can be made about an individual, according to the standard story. Here, again, the Lockean distinction helps. If what makes a species a species is some set of shared (or mostly shared) causal properties (the “real essence” in Locke’s terms), as it surely must be if species are real things individually, then it doesn’t not follow that we will have access to them. One can be simultaneously a nominalist with respect to descriptions of species and an essentialist with respect to causes. The individualist thesis is, I believe, based upon a false dichotomy. Richards ends up concluding in favour of the individualist thesis (under the rubric “species-as- individuals”), but despite his proposing a distinction between functional and taxonomic essentialism (with Renaissance naturalists, p. 54), he doesn’t not seem to make much of it where it would help. All in all, this book will be extremely useful for teaching purposes, and as an excellent introduction to a complex and difficult subject. Moreover, it sets up the issues for the various alternative views, in particular the individualist view. However, I think that it doesn’t not offer a proper treatment of the homeostatic property cluster view, and that in the end it is not entirely convincing,
even when, as I do, you think that the solution presented in the book is probably right. R EFERENCES Amundson R. 2005. The changing rule of the embryo in evolutionary biology: structure and synthesis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bird A. 2009. Essences and natural kinds. In: Poidevin R.L., Simons P., McGonigal A., Cameron R., editors. Routledge companion to metaphysics. Abingdon (UK): Routledge. pp. 497–506. Ghiselin M. T. 1974. A radical solution to the species problem. Syst. Zool. 23:536–544. Hull D.L. 1965. The effect of essentialism on taxonomy: two thousand years of stasis. British. J. Philos. Sci. 15:314–326,; 16:1–18. Kitts D.B., Kitts D.J. 1979. Biological species as natural kinds. Philos. Sci. 46:613–622. Levit G.S., Meister K. 2006. The history of essentialism vs. Ernst Mayr’s “essentialism story”: a case study of German idealistic morphology. Theory Biosci. 124:281–307. McOuat G.R. 2001. From cutting nature at its joints to measuring it: new kinds and new kinds of people in biology. Studies. Hist. Philos. Sci. Part A. 32:613–645. O’Hara R.J. 1997. Population thinking and tree thinking in systematics. Zool. Scripta. 26:323–329. Okasha S. 2002. Darwinian metaphysics: species and the question of essentialism. Synthese. 131:191–213. Sober E. 1980. Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism. Philos. Sci. 47:350–383. Wilkins J.S. 2009a. Defining species: a sourcebook from antiquity to today. New York: Peter Lang. ———Wilkins J.S. 2009b. Species: a history of the idea. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press. Winsor M.P. 2003. Non-essentialist methods in pre-Darwinian taxonomy. Biol. Philos. 18:387–400. ———Winsor M.P. 2006a. The creation of the essentialism story: an exercise in metahistory. Hist. Philos. Life Sci. 28:149–174. ———Winsor M.P. 2006b. Linnaeus’ biology was not essentialist. Ann. MissouriMo. Bot. Gard. 93:2–7.
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John S. Wilkins , School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University 180 of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; E-mail:
[email protected] Q1
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