Essentialist thinking, while not nearly as important or formal as Ernst Mayr depicted it, may undergird some creationist assessments of hominin fossils. Since essentialism cannot be falsified, it can only be used as a guiding principle for selecting character sets for further evaluation, which is a form of character weighting. Here, essentialist reasoning is used to design character sets that ought to distinguish human from nonhuman taxa in the fossil record. The first such set, consisting of fifteen bipedalism-related characteristics, fails to recognize Au. africanus as nonhuman. The second group of character sets derived from a larger set of craniodental characters also fails to reliably distinguish human from nonhuman fossils. The same craniodental character subsets, when subjected to distance correlation and cluster analysis, also produce spurious results by putting humans and obvious nonhumans together in the same clusters. These results indicate that the ideal of essentialism is a poor guide to distinguishing human from nonhuman. ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Ernst Mayr famously contrasted Darwinian evolution with a position he called typology or essentialism (e.g. Mayr 1969). According to Mayr, the essentialist defined a species by the possession of certain immutable and essential traits, the presence of which were both necessary and sufficient to identify an individual as a member of that species. Any species’ essential traits are possessed only by that species and no others. According to Mayr, this approach to understanding species came to us from the work of Plato and his notion of the eidos, an unchanging form of which the material world was a changeable instantiation. Mayr contrasted essentialism with “population thinking,” which he attributed to Darwin. Population thinking merely recognized that certain populations presently share traits in common but that the population could change in the future. For Mayr, the defining characteristic of a species was simply the ability to interbreed, which he acknowledged would change over time as new species emerged. Mayr’s view of essentialism and its connection to Platonic thinking is now recognized to be an oversimplified fabrication (Kitcher 1987; Winsor 2006). The history of pre-Darwinian biology only occasionally conforms to the essentialist way of thinking, and species change and transmutation were speculations before Darwin ever thought of the idea. Even essentialism’s connection to Plato is questionable (Powers 2013). Perhaps most surprising of all, Mayr’s correspondence shows that he was aware that at least one of his colleagues personally objected to Mayr’s essentialist caricature, but Mayr ignored that objection (Winsor 2006). The fully developed “essentialist” view of biology is a myth. Despite a greater understanding of the history of philosophy and biology today, we may still discover echoes of what appear to be Mayrian essentialist thinking in creationist biology, especially as it applies to the identification of the human kind. For example, one encounters frequent claims that walking upright on the hindlimbs (obligate bipedalism) is a trait of humans not shared by any apes. Biddle (2016) states it simply, “Only humans stand and walk entirely on two feet.” Similarly, creationists generate lists of traits that are ostensibly possessed only by humans and not by apes (e.g., see Menton 2005; Biddle 2016). Even the demand for character weighting in baraminology seems to echo essentialist thinking with its notion that some characters are more important than others for defining created kinds (see Williams 2004; O’Micks 2016). When we consider the creation account in Genesis, one can easily see why an essentialist approach to humanity would be appealing. In Genesis, we see a repeated stress of humanity as distinct from the animal creation. Animals are made after their kinds, but humans are made in the image of God. Humans are given dominion over the animal creation, and Adam’s inspection of the animals revealed no suitable counterpart. Some form of essentialism must therefore be true, because the Bible appears to reveal an essential and important difference between humans and animals. Should we therefore approach identifying humanity as a problem of identifying the essential characteristics that define human beings? To put it another way, is essentialism character-based? Responding to any claim of character-based essentialism poses little difficulty: one simply asks why those traits ought to be considered essential for defining humanity, as one could do for an essentialist approach to any created kind. Is there any philosophical or theological justification within creationism to approach the identification of kinds in this manner? Is that justification sound and compelling? More generally, character-based essentialism is always vulnerable to future discoveries. The mere empirical observation that one category possesses traits not found in any other category does not require the metaphysical conclusion that such traits are essential and can never Todd Charles Wood, Core Academy of Science, P.O. Box 1076 Dayton, TN 37321, toddcharleswood@gmail.com © Cedarville University International Conference on Creationism. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of Cedarville University. Wood C.T. 2023. Essentialism and the Human Kind, or Experiments in Character Weighting. In J.H. Whitmore (editor), Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 88-119. Cedarville, Ohio: Cedarville University International Conference on Creationism. 9th 2023 ESSENTIALISM AND THE HUMAN KIND, OR EXPERIMENTS IN CHARACTER WEIGHTING KEYWORDS hominins, human origins, paleoanthropology, baraminology, essentialism
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=