RSSEssentialism Vs Population Thinking
Jun 08
epistemology, general observations, suitable quotations 1 Comment
Western thinking for more than two thousand years after Plato was dominated by essentialism. It was not until the nineteenth century that a new and different way of thinking about nature began to spread, so-called population thinking. What is population thinking and how does it differ from essentialism? Population thinkers stress the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. What is important to them is the individual, not the type. They emphasise that every individual in a sexually reproducing species is uniquely different from all others, with much individuality even existing in uniparentally reproducing ones. There is no ‘typical’ individual, and mean values are abstractions. Much of what in the past has been designated in biology as ‘classes’ are populations consisting of unique individuals.
Ernst Mayr ‘The Growth Of Biological Thought‘
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