do life‐forms evolve or do uses for life? some doubts about Brown's universale hypotheses

Standard hypotheses regarding folk biological life-form evolution are not confirmed by data from Sinama, Sahaptin, and Tzeltal. This is probably because such hypotheses have been developed from highly inadequate data. Empirical determination of the focus, range, and defining features of highly inclusive categories shows that such categories are not universal, as has been claimed. Frequently, such categories class what is useful or useless, and therefore reflect a closer correspondence between biological categories and socioeconomic factors than current theory admits. [cognitive anthropology, ethnobiology, folk classification, language universals, category exemplars]

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