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New Essentialism in Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Olivier Rieppel
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Abstract

The architects of the modern synthesis banned essentialism from evolutionary theory. This rejection of essentialism was motivated by Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the continuity of evolutionary transformation. Contemporary evolutionary biology witnesses a renaissance of essentialism in three contexts: “origin essentialism” with respect to species and supraspecific taxa, the bar coding of species on the basis of discontinuities of DNA variation between populations, and the search for laws of evolutionary developmental biology. Such “new essentialism” in contemporary biology must be of a new kind that accommodates relational (extrinsic) properties as historical essences and cluster concepts of natural kinds.

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Research Article
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 2010 , pp. 662 - 673
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Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

My thanks go to Marc Ereshefsky and an anonymous reviewer who offered helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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