ABSTRACT
Talk about human nature, particularly in an evolutionary framework, can get you into trouble with two sets of people: philosophers of biology and anthropologists. In both cases, there is an objection to the essentialism that seems inherent in such a concept. As David Hull (1986) and Michael Ghiselin (1997) famously pointed out, biological species are not natural kinds in the way of chemical elements; that is to say, they are not the sort of things that can possess an intrinsic essence. Hydrogen is hydrogen, for example, because it has the atomic number 1, an intrinsic feature shared by all hydrogen atoms that is always and forever the case (i.e., it possesses a particular micro-structural property that accounts for all of its macro-structural properties, no matter when or where you find it). Species are not like this: they come into being at a particular time and place, they come to an end when they go extinct, and they are made up of populations that can vary in their attributes—attributes that can themselves vary over time. As Hull (1986) puts it, species are individuals, not kinds (see also Sober 1980). It makes no sense to propose some intrinsic, hidden essence or “nature” that can explain why species are the way they are. 1 Although species are real entities, they are also simply analytical conveniences that reflect the ecological spatiotemporal scale at which humans view and understand the world around them.
