From: John Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 01 Jun 2005 - 02:42:35 GMT
On 01/06/2005, at 11:47 AM, Scott Chase wrote:
>
>
>
> --- John Wilkins <j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>>
>> On 01/06/2005, at 11:09 AM, Scott Chase wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>> John foaming at the mouth if he's reading this :-)
>>>
>>
>> Fortunately I'm not. But while not reading this, let
>> me not make this
>> point: The view you are referring to is basically
>> that of the
>> nominalists (all general terms are flatus vocus -
>> breath of the
>> voice), or conventionalism, a view that arises, so
>> far as I can tell,
>> with Locke.
>>
>> In modern biological taxonomy, this is what I call
>> species denial. A
>> species is just some handy tag we assign to
>> organisms to help
>> communication between scientists. I have some
>> sympathy for it,
>> although I reject it.
>>
>>
> Likewise, essentialism has its allure too, but can be
> taken too far. We have Owen's vertebrate and Goethe's
> leaf, but each must be historicized, via homology and
> the common ancestor. There are phylum level
> conceptualizations in evo-devo that I remember like
> the phylotypic stage of pharyngula (doesn't somebody
> have a website named after this one?). These phylum
> level distinctions would give most nominalists a
> severe case of wheezing and hives. Essentialism and
> nominalism represent a tension of opposites.
Essentialism is overrated. A recent book by Ron Amundson argues that
it was never a precondition for taxonomy in biology, and I agree with
him. In fact, the ideal morphologists were not essentialists at all.
It's well worth a read, and I have a short review up on my blog
evolvethought.blogspot.com.
Paul Myers has pharyngula.org, which has excellent discussions of
development (and politics, if you are into that sort of thing). Just
don't tell him I sent you...
Oh, and the book:
Amundson, Ron. 2005. The changing rule of the embryo in evolutionary
biology: structure and synthesis, Cambridge studies in philosophy and
biology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
-- John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122 =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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