I'm talking at Berkeley

Those of you who live near San Francisco might be interested in this talk I'm giving at the Pizza Munch gathering at UC Berkeley in November.

For November we've made arrangements to meet jointly with the Bay Area Biosystematists in Berkeley on Thursday, November 9. John Wilkins (Queensland) will give a talk entitled "The Unseasonable Lateness of Being, Or, Essentialism Comes After Darwin, Not Before."

Abstract: The received view of the history of the species concept is that before Darwin, naturalists held to a view of essentialism, according to which species were constituted by necessary and sufficient traits. I will argue that this is a misunderstanding based on a conflation of the Aristotelian logical and metaphysical tradition of the essence of predicates, with the use of the term "species" and the Greek term "eidos" in natural history. Instead, I will attempt to show that taxonomists (including Darwin) held to a diagnostic or taxonomic essentialism, but that nobody before Darwin, with a possible exception in Grew, argued that a species had a material or causal essence, and that the essentialism of the received view actually arose after Darwin's views, possibly as a reaction to Haeckelian evolutionary ideas in French and German speaking countries, based on the revival of Thomism in Catholic intellectual circles after 1871, between the 1890s and the 1920s. The myth of essentialism appears to be formulated around the centenary of the Origin and after, based perhaps on the early experiences of Mayr as an undergraduate.

John Wilkins is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland Biohumanities Project. His thesis on species concepts has developed into a book, presently under review for
publication as a history of the ideas of "species" through the classical, medieval and modern eras.

The meeting will follow the usual Biosystematists format. We'll assemble in Berkeley for social hour and dinner at 5:30, followed by Wilkins' talk at 7:00. The meeting will be in Valley Life Sciences Bldg (VLSB) Room 2063.