The Relation Between Essentialist Beliefs and Evolutionary Reasoning

Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection. The present study investigated whether such beliefs are impediments to learning this concept as well. Participants (43 children aged 4-9 and 34 adults) were asked to judge the variability of various behavioral and anatomical properties across different members of the same species. Adults who accepted within-species variation-both actual and potential-were significantly more likely to demonstrate a selection-based understanding of evolution than adults who denied within-species variation. The latter demonstrated an alternative, incorrect understanding of evolution and produced response patterns that were both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to those produced by preschool-aged children. Overall, it is argued that psychological essentialism, although a useful bias for drawing species-wide inductions, leads individuals to devalue within-species variation and, consequently, to fail to understand natural selection.

[1]  E. Mayr.  The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance , 1983 .

[2]  J. Clement.  Students’ preconceptions in introductory mechanics , 1982 .

[3]  D. Medin,et al.  Cultural and experiential differences in the development of folkbiological induction , 2003 .

[4]  Ned Block.  Holism, mental and semantic , 1996 .

[5]  H. Wellman,et al.  Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious , 1991, Cognition.

[6]  Charles Weijer,et al.  Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. , 1997 .

[7]  L. Frank.  The Society for Research in Child Development , 1935 .

[8]  Jon Star,et al.  Children's interpretation of generic noun phrases. , 2002, Developmental psychology.

[9]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Curvilinear motion in the absence of external forces: naive beliefs about the motion of objects. , 1980, Science.

[10]  K. Rosengren,et al.  A rose by any other name: Preschoolers' understanding of individual identity across name and appearance changes , 1996 .

[11]  E. M. Evans,et al.  Cognitive and Contextual Factors in the Emergence of Diverse Belief Systems: Creation versus Evolution , 2001, Cognitive Psychology.

[12]  The inheritance of desired characteristics: Children's view of the role of intention in parent-offspring resemblance. , 1999, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[13]  D. Medin,et al.  Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective: early essentialist notions are shaped by cultural beliefs. , 2007, Developmental psychology.

[14]  Andrew Shtulman,et al.  Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution , 2006, Cognitive Psychology.

[15]  G. Miller,et al.  Cognitive science. , 1981, Science.

[16]  Reinout W. Wiers,et al.  Children's Thoughts on the Origin of Species: A Study of Explanatory Coherence , 1997, Cogn. Sci..

[17]  Charles W. Anderson,et al.  Student conceptions of natural selection and its role in evolution , 1986 .

[18]  Phillip Wolff,et al.  Evolution and devolution of folkbiological knowledge , 1999, Cognition.

[19]  Ken Springer,et al.  Young Children's Understanding of a Biological Basis for Parent‐Offspring Relations , 1996 .

[20]  Howard E. Gruber,et al.  Darwin on man. A psychological study of scientific creativity, together with Darwin's early and unpublished notebooks , 1975, Medical History.

[21]  Michael R. Waldmann,et al.  Causal models and the acquisition of category structure , 1995 .

[22]  M. Brumby,et al.  Misconceptions about the concept of natural selection by medical biology students , 1984 .

[23]  Ibrahim A. Halloun,et al.  Common sense concepts about motion , 1985 .

[24]  S. Gelman,et al.  As time goes by: children's early understanding of growth in animals. , 1991, Child development.

[25]  F. Keil.  Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development , 1989 .

[26]  David L. Hull,et al.  THE EFFECT OF ESSENTIALISM ON TAXONOMY—TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF STASIS (I) * , 1965, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[27]  Noah D. Goodman,et al.  Going beyond the evidence: Abstract laws and preschoolers’ responses to anomalous data , 2008, Cognition.

[28]  S. Carey,et al.  Like father, like son: young children's understanding of how and why offspring resemble their parents. , 1996, Child development.

[29]  S. Gelman,et al.  Beyond labeling: the role of maternal input in the acquisition of richly structured categories. , 1991, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[30]  F. Keil,et al.  On the development of biologically specific beliefs: the case of inheritance. , 1989, Child development.

[31]  E. Markman,et al.  Young children's inductions from natural kinds: the role of categories and appearances. , 1987, Child development.

[32]  B. Gruenberg.  What Evolution Is , 1926 .

[33]  Jon R. Star,et al.  Children's Use of Generics in Inductive Inferences , 2002 .

[34]  Susan C. Johnson,et al.  Why dogs have puppies and cats have kittens: the role of birth in young children's understanding of biological origins. , 1997, Child development.

[35]  Tamer G. Amin,et al.  “Is heat hot?” Inducing conceptual change by integrating everyday and scientific perspectives on thermal phenomena , 2001 .

[36]  Frank C. Keil,et al.  An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: the insides story , 1995, Cognition.

[37]  W. Brewer,et al.  Mental models of the earth, sun, and moon: Indian children's cosmologies , 1996 .

[38]  Twila Tardif,et al.  A cross-linguistic comparison of generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin , 1998, Cognition.

[39]  Andrzej Tarłowski.  If it's an animal it has axons: Experience and culture in preschool children's reasoning about animates , 2006 .

[40]  Stella Vosniadou,et al.  Mental Models of the Day/Night Cycle , 1994, Cogn. Sci..