Abstract
The vision of natural kinds that is most common in the modern philosophy of biology, particularly with respect to the question whether species and other taxa are natural kinds, is based on a revision of the notion by Mill in A System of Logic. However, there was another conception that Whewell had previously captured well, which taxonomists have always employed, of kinds as being types that need not have necessary and sufficient characters and properties, or essences. These competing views employ different approaches to scientific methodologies: Mill’s class-kinds are not formed by induction but by deduction, while Whewell’s type-kinds are inductive. More recently, phylogenetic kinds (clades, or monophyletic-kinds) are inductively projectible, and escape Mill’s strictures. Mill’s version represents a shift in the notions of kinds from the biological to the physical sciences.
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Notes
Of course, non-natural kinds, like pencil can also have essences, as Michael Devitt pointed out to me (see his Devitt 2005).
Which of course is not unchallenged in modern philosophy of language and logic. Kripke and Plantinga, among others (e.g., Parsons 1969), permit individual essences, although Hull (1977) noted that with respect to taxa, this would mean that any object that had the same individual essence would need to be the same object (which is, of course, Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles).
Since I hold there never was any kind of taxonomic essentialism in natural history, of course this is an introduction, not a reintroduction. And it is not clear to me that Devitt’s version is taxonomic.
Gordon McOuat (2009) covers much the same territory I do here, although he tends to take a more political view than I do. I believe he is correct that underlying much of this debate is concern over the political implications of these ideas but I think that is ancillary to the point I am making here. McOuat also cautions against being an essentialist about essentialism—we should not presume that historical periods have essential characters either, with which I fully agree; but he sees essentialists where I see merely taxonomists using diagnostic definitions (for example, in his McOuat 1996).
Something Aristotle did not do, in the modern sense of essentialism (Charles 2002). He was not engaged upon any kind of taxonomic project, so far as I can tell, and was neither a Lockean conventionalist, nor a Leibnizian modal essentialist. However, he did in his natural histories sometimes seem to think that science could be done, at least in part, by definition. Where Locke was the clearer of the undergrowth for science, Aristotle is its gardener, tidying up the mess of ordinary knowledge. Charles, in his Chap. 12, has a full discussion, in which he notes that Aristotle’s distinct classes are formed on the basis of his “soul function” theory from De Anima. Aristotle’s kinds are functional kinds, not taxonomic kinds. This is a recurring theme in biological essentialism, right up to Darwin’s distinction between adaptive similarity and affinities.
Locke’s friend John Ray (1686, Tome I, Libr. I, XX: 40) introduced the technical natural history meaning of species in 1686, in his Historia Plantarum Generalis:
After long and considerable investigation, no surer criterion for determining species has occurred to me than the distinguishing features that perpetuate themselves in propagation from seed. Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the species, if they spring from the seed of one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such as to distinguish a species […] Animals likewise that differ specifically preserve their distinct species permanently […] one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa.
Within a century, this was the consensus meaning of naturalists. It is, for example, Linnaeus’ usage, for Linnaeus never defines what he means by the term species (although Müller-Wille and Orel 2007, make out a good case that he had something in mind based on reproduction).
My edition is the ninth (1875). The quoted text is unchanged from the first to the ninth editions.
It was first published in 1812 under the title “Discours préliminaire” to his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupeds (Cuvier 1812). It was reprinted separately as the Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe: et sur les changements qu'elles ont produits dans le règne animal in 1825 and listed as the third edition, and is often referred to as the Règne Animal. It may be this that Whately has read. The English edition (Cuvier 1831, p. 73) gives this translation:
This inquiry calls for the definition of a species, which may serve as the foundation for the use which is made of the term. A species, then, includes the individuals which descend from one another, or from common parents, and those which resemble them as strongly as they resemble one another. Thus we only call the varieties of a species, those races more or less different, which may have proceeded from them by generation. Our observations on the distinctions between ancestors and descendants are consequently our only rational rule; for every other would enter into hypothesis without proofs. [italics original, p. 125 in the 1825 French edition].
Among the philosophers, however, things were different. Diderot, Maupertuis and others discussed the nascent taxonomic conventions extensively.
I think it was Paul Griffiths.
Mill saw himself in conflict with Whewell for political and moral reasons as well as for logical and methodological reasons (Snyder 2006, Chap. 3).
If the thesis of the historical portion of this paper is correct, that Mill is the founder of essentialistic natural kinds into philosophy, then he may be taken to have uttered the first such conflation.
Dewey is not to be dismissed lightly, however. His treatment of species focused quite correctly on the generative aspects:
This formal activity which operates throughout a series of changes and holds them to a single course; which subordinates their aimless flux to its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals distant in space and remote in time to a uniform type of structure and function: this principle seemed to give insight into the very nature of reality itself. To it Aristotle gave the name, είδος. This term the scholastics translated as species.
Wilkins (2009) argues that generation and morphological similarity were the constituent elements of what I term the Generative Conception of Species, which underlies pretty well all research on biological kinds from the classical era until the turn of the twentieth century and the discovery of genetics. Dewey’s rhetoric is a little over-extended, but is well within that tradition.
In his discussion of Hamilton’s philosophy, he writes: “We have now attained a theory of Classification, of Class Notions, and of Class Names…” showing that for him, classification was a matter of conceptual kinds (Mill 1889, p. 402). As Snyder (2006, p. 164) observes, Mill had less direct experience of science than Whewell, whose classificatory ideas were formed when he studied mineralogy with Mohs. Oddly, Whewell doesn’t employ the type-kind approach to minerals.
But the “nature” that Socrates is discussing here is social: the cut he is considering is that of delineating what is Justice (dike).
Despite this claim of priority being repeated often, it is unlikely that Venn meant much by this; see his discussion in chapter III, Sect. 3 of the 1876 and later editions. He did not mean by “natural kind” what Mill did. In fact he most probably meant what Whewell or even Cuvier did (see the later editions, III. 6, 17)—kinds formed by descent. In particular I don’t think that he was keying into the debates about artificial and natural classification earlier that century.
Discussed in Wilkins (2009).
In the text he says, “… how erroneous is the idea of assuming any particular organ as the sole source of the Essential Character” and in the note, “It is not to the Essential Character itself, as defined by Fabricius, (Phil. Ent. p. 96) that I object; but to the impossibility of finding such. “Character essentialis optimus facillimus at vix possibilis.” Why then trouble ourselves with hunting after such a chimera?” Clearly this is for diagnosis—Macleay believes diagnostic characters can be found. The term “Essential character” was widely used in botanical works of the time as the diagnostic properties of a genus or order, etc. (vide Lindley 1830).
Linnaeus may have, according to speculation by his biographer Lisbet Koerner (1999, 48f), developed his scheme of short names and simple diagnostic descriptions based on generic and specific characters, in order for his students to name the food plants that cattle were eating, for agricultural research, in his 1749 tract, Pan Svericus.
Some French commentators held that a classification was “natural” if it was agreeable to human cognition (McOuat personal communication). However, the debate over natural classification that began in English via the impact of Locke on systematists, continued with Milne-Edwards (1844) in French, famously influencing Darwin. Most of those taxonomists who used the phrase “natural system” and cognates, meant by it something like the Adansonian view that many characters were to be used.
Other than apparent resemblance; a particularly nice instance of which is John Lindley’s (1830) influential botanical work, in the preface of which he says that the modern botanists are able to “make their classification coincide with natural affinities” (vi), and that “the natural system of Botany” is founded on the principles that “those plants which are most alike should be arranged next to each other”, and that “those which have the smallest mutual resemblance should be placed at the greatest distance”. This is, he writes, “obviously the method of classification pointed out by nature and reason” (v). Any higher taxon (that is, of an arrangement of species, for “Nature herself, … creates species only”, vii), is “called natural, not because it exists in Nature, but because it comprehends species naturally resembling each other more than they resemble anything else” (viii). Lindley is clearly influenced by Adansonian principles in respect of the naturalness of classification (Stafleu 1963; Winsor 2004).
Owen’s (1843, p. 374) definition was “Homologue. The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function”.
In the History, Whewell (1884, p. 639) ascribes the term homology to the German school (presumably Oken and Goethe), and implies that Owen has merely taken it over into English. The definition Owen gives is in a glossary to the work, so it may be he was using a term that had some currency already, but which most readers would find unfamiliar. I have been unable to find prior uses in English. Geoffroy does use the term “analogy” in French to mean something more like what Owen meant by homology, and the term “homologue” is used to apply to chemical kinds, but nothing biological that I can locate. However, both Whewell and Owen (1848) are right, in that the Germans used the term, particularly Oken (1847) in the Physiophilosophie. I am indebted to Gareth Nelson for assistance with tracking down these uses.
There is considerable variation for the wording of this quote. A common variant is “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” Rutherford should have used the quote given in the text, however.
Another interpretation here is that Rutherford recognized that physics needs to have observed clusters of properties in order to apply to the world, and with this I must agree, but I doubt that was his intent. [Author specific comment deleted].
Or rather, specimens—the raw “data” of a phylogenetic inference are individual specimens. One may take them to be stand-ins for their species, but even in the molecular period, the data sets being analyzed are usually those of single individuals who have been sequenced.
Darwin used the terms “affinity” for sets of homologous characters, and “analogy” for homoplasious characters, directly influenced by the discussions of, among others, Swainson (1835) and Milne-Edwards (1844). See, for instance, Whewell’s discussion in Bk VIII, Chap. II, Sect. 4, in which he notes that mere resemblance is not enough for a natural system; one must also use “natural affinity” (Whewell 1847, vol 1, p. 488). In 1843 Owen defined “homology” (1843), and in 1870 Lankester the term “homoplasy” (1870). A slew of similar terms in molecular systematics have also since been invented, such as paralogy, and orthology, xenology, gametology, and sinology (Fitch 2000; Mindell and Meyer 2001). For a review of the history of homology, see Laubichler (2000).
Alas for philosophy, “Raptors” has now been divided into two disparate clades, the order Falconiformes, which include around 290 species of diurnal birds of prey, and the order Accipitriformes, which include around 225 species, including eagles, hawks and New World vultures (see Hackett et al. 2008). Though this makes the example less pleasing, it in fact strengthens the point, as inductive inferences will now no longer be as projectible between them (just as the group “vultures” ceased to be so projectible when it was discovered that Old World vultures were more closely related to the Accipitridae, eagles and kites, etc., than to New World vultures, which are more closely related to Cathartidae, such as storks).
Hence Elliot Sober’s (1999, 2008) recent proposal for a form of logical inference he calls modus Darwin, in which common ancestry can be inferred from similarity, misrepresents what Darwin and subsequent phylogeneticists actually did when inferring phylogenies. With the notions of “analogy”, and later with “homoplasy”, being clearly understood and used, it has always been known that mere similarity is insufficient to infer common ancestry, or else bats, birds and pteranodons can be assigned to a single group, a point made by, among others, T. H. Huxley. In fine case of historical irony, Huxley’s (1957) grandson Julian tried to hoist a homoplasious group for thinking beings—Psychozoa.
However, I really doubt this will be true—even when traits like legs are lost, as in the case of snakes, the genes that were involved in making legs are not excised, but are silenced or down-regulated. They remain there and are available to sequencing (and what is more, I predict this in the absence of empirical knowledge based on phylogenetic considerations).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Michael Devitt, Gordon McOuat, Polly Winsor, Paul Griffiths, Karola Stotz, and Dominic Murphy for critical comments and suggestions. I also thank Philip Sloan for his discussions at ISHPSSB 2009, and the audience there. This work was undertaken with funding from an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship DP0984826, based on work done under a previous ARC grant FF0457917.
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Wilkins, J.S. Biological Essentialism and the Tidal Change of Natural Kinds. Sci & Educ 22, 221–240 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9450-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9450-z