Biological Essentialism

by Michael Devitt
Oxford University Press, 2023, 224 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

Biological essentialism is the idea that species and other taxonomical classifications, collectively known as taxa, are defined by their innate properties. Michael Devitt, a professor of philosophy, says that the consensus among biologists and philosophers of biology is that essentialism is false and incompatible with Darwinism. He says the consensus is wrong and biological essentialism is, in fact, true.

As a biochemist, I would venture to say that fewer than one in a hundred biologists has ever heard of this issue, let alone taken sides. The prevailing belief is that speciation occurs as the result of genetic drift. If two populations don't interbreed, their DNA eventually becomes incompatible, producing infertile offspring at first, and later unable to produce any offspring at all. This can happen if the number of chromosomes changes or if the DNA sequences are too different for a cell to divide without incurring fatal chromosomal damage.

As an aside, it's well known that some animals (ducks, for instance) sometimes try to mate with other species, with deceased conspecifics, inanimate replicas, and members of their own sex. Granted, poor vision may be one factor, but maybe it's also nature's way of testing and enforcing species boundaries. Perhaps there could be a survival advantage even in humans for a small percentage of such attempts as a way of defeating genetic drift. Maybe this could explain both the existence of homosexuality and the well established finding of sexual preference for outsiders.

Evidently, though, not all philosophers of biology are up to date with our current understanding of speciation. Devitt cites a supposedly influential 2002 paper by Samir Okasha (paywalled, so no link) and articles by Daniel Dennett and others who assert that philosophers “reject unequivocally that an individual is essentially a member of its species.” He quotes Robert A. Wilson as saying “conspecificity is not determined by shared intrinsic properties but by organisms' standing in certain relations to one another.”

The most extreme view comes from Marion Godman and David Papineau, who say DNA is practically irrelevant in determining species traits:

Why do all tigers grow up the same, and different from zebras . . . . Tigers are raised by tigers, and zebras by zebras, and many of their species-characteristic properties can be due to this in itself — without any assistance from their genes. [p.79]

It turns out, though, aside from this handful of extremists, many of the claims of the two sides hardly differ. The main point of contention seems to be the use of the word ‘essentialism,’ which is now a derogatory term in fashionable circles. So what are philosophers really arguing about? Are they confusing essentialism with creationism or with Aristotelian logic? No one who has ever done PCR genotyping thinks species are defined by anything but genetic clusters of their DNA sequences. No biologist would ever deny such a thing.

What's actually happening is massive gaslighting. Just as activists claimed a few years ago that “the science” had definitively proved there were vast numbers of sexes, so these academics are trying to make us think “most biologists” agree with them.

The dispute comes to a crisis in Chapter 5, when the International Commission of Zoological Nomen­cla­ture (ICZN) decided that a specimen of the California red-sided garter snake (Thamno­phis sirtalis infernalis) was actually a San Francisco garter snake (Thamno­phis sirtalis tetratenia), but elected to call it a new subspecies instead. Apparently this caused quite a ruckus.

Honestly, my eyes started glazing over at this point.

But of course, there's a hidden agenda for all this nonsense, which is that some people are now claiming there's no such thing as race. The very concept that race exists, they say, is racist. They then shut down the debate by calling anyone who disagrees with them a racist—which by their previous argument is a meaningless term.

Thus begat the “race realists,” who are unafraid to argue to the contrary, sometimes with evidence and sometimes not.

At stake in this arcane and admittedly extremely boring issue are hundreds of billions of dollars, the future comity of race relations in America, and the survival of tens of thousands of patients suffering from race-specific genetic diseases should doctors be forbidden to consider a patient's race during diagnosis.

In the last chapter Devitt tries to walk a fine line, defending his view on philosophical grounds. The question could of course be easily settled, if one were inclined to, by measuring DNA SNP clustering patterns in different ethnic groups. But that would require courage. In an age of bio-denialism, almost no one who has an answer, least of all in academia, dares to speak the truth.

On the other hand, scientists would reasonably question why they should spend resources proving something that is obviously true. A better question is why people pretend one thing is true when it benefits them and pretend the opposite is true when it doesn't. That's a question that belongs to politics and psychology, not biology.

Update Another controversy has arisen in the exciting high-stakes world of zoological nomenclature as the ICZN has refused to change the name of an obscure beetle named in 1937 after Hitler amid claims that museum specimens were being stolen by WWII memorabilia collectors. Oh, those wacky wacky humans.

may 10, 2024. updated may 17, 2024

Infinite Thought:
Truth and the Return of Philosophy

by Alain Badiou
Bloomsbury, 2003 / 2014, 164 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

The word ‘infinite’ in the title “Infinite Thought” refers to Badiou's idea that ontology is set theory, which is a branch of mathematics that allows us to compare two infinite sets to say which is bigger. This fact, along with the magical null set {Ø}, which holds “nothingness,” has endless fascination for Badiou. His first book on the subject, Being and Event, and his second book Logics of Worlds,* where he tries to explain what he said in the first book, expand that idea to 1176 pages. So they aren't infinite, though they seem like it: I keep a copy by my bedside in case I have trouble falling asleep. So perhaps, I thought, this collection of essays could serve as a readable, or at least finite, way of finding out whether there's any more to this guy's philosophy than a three-word phrase like ‘ontology is math.’

As for the second word “thought,” here I think Badiou misses the mark. Thoughts are supposed to make sense. What we get instead, for the most part, are airy generalities that must be re-read several times to be understood, like this one in Chapter 2 (Philosophy and Truth):

[W]hat is the essential philosophical problem concerning truth? It is the problem of its appearance and its ‘becoming’ . . . the subject of a truth demands the indiscernible. [p.49–51]

By ‘indiscernible’ he means that two terms in a situation cannot be distinguished by language, so no decision can be made. What does it mean to say truth demands one? I have no idea. This is the difficulty faced by the reader.

The bad writing style can't be attributed to bad translation. In Chapter 1, Philosophy and Desire, where he writes:

. . . at base the desire of philosophy implies a dimension of revolt: there is no philosophy without the discontent of thinking in its confrontation with the world as it is. Yet the desire of philosophy also includes logic . . . [emphasis in the original]

even the translators feel compelled to defend themselves by adding a paragraph at the end of explaining that it's not their fault. “The desire of philosophy” is not a bad translation and this really is what Badiou wrote: the title in French is “Le Désir de philosophie.”

In Being and Event he writes:

Ontology is a rich, complex, unfinishable science, submitted to the difficult constraint of a fidelity.

The problem here is not so much that his ideas make no sense, or that they're too technical, but that he uses words that simply don't fit, like marshmallows in a bean casserole. They're not solecisms, exactly, but, well, see for yourself:

The support that mathematics furnishes for the desacralization or depoetization of the truth must be explicitly sanctioned: pedagogically via the crucial place given to arithmetic and geometry in political education, and ontologically via their intelligible dignity which provides an antechamber to the ultimate deployments of the dialectic. [p.77]

You can see the problem. Since when is geometry taught in political education? What on earth is intelligible dignity? How do you sanction support? And how in the hell do you deploy a dialectic—through an antechamber, no less—and how can dignity be an antechamber?

Yes, 'antechamber' is a metaphor, and sure, with enough imagination we can cram some sense into this sentence, but in so doing we run the risk of misinterpreting his work not as philosophy, but as something else, maybe a book on architecture or a hair care manual. That's the danger of imprecise language.

The general idea in his main thesis (i.e. mathematics = ontology) is that there are two doctrines: inconsistent multiplicity, which says that multiples can't be multiples of individual things; and the doctrine of the void, which says that ‘nothing’ is uncount­able and the void is what is not there, but what is necessary for anything to be there. According to Badiou, just one set exists: the null set. Being (with a capital B) is an infinite set, aka a ‘multiple.’ Situations (i.e., events) have unity, which means their structure is the result of ‘count-for-one,’ by which Badiou means they're in a set, which makes them count as one thing.

Now, that might not strike you as an earth-shaking hypothesis, and you'd probably be right. The main value of this book is for readers to find out if they can stand this kind of stuff. Here's a typical sentence, picked at random, from Logics of Worlds:

This is a consequence that combines the (axiomatic) existence of a minimum, responsible for measuring the non-appearance of a being in a world, and the (derived) existence of a given transcendental degree. [p. 138]

What he's saying there in that confused jumble of nonsensical words is that when something is in the world, it has a fixed amount of existence. Which, you must admit, is probably true. That's what you'd be in for. Imagine 600 pages of this.

In some of the essays, Badiou descends almost to Earth and writes sentences that make sense. And so we have to hear his political views. Lucky us. In case you didn't already know, he's a flaming Marxist. He says without irony that Lenin, Mao, and Che Guevara were “great political thinkers.” The Soviet Union collapsed because it wasn't communist enough. America is a hegemonic imperial power. And so on.

It's disappointing that someone supposedly capable of “infinite thoughts” would have such unsophisticated political views. But his philosophy is infused with his politics, and it's the usual two-sided politics where his side is good and the other side is evil. If he wanted his philosophy to succeed he'd be more like Heidegger, who kept his stupid politics out of his philosophy and whom he admires almost as much as Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and Che. And he'd buy a copy of the French equivalent of Grammarly.

* These two titles would ring a bell for philosophers. The first one is clearly modeled after Heidegger's Being and Time and the second one from Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World.

may 31, 2024