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    Biological kinds such as species and genera have essentia... — Carmelics
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    321,452
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    Home/Personal Identity
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Biological kinds such as species and genera have essential properties, and those properties are historical rather than intrinsic.

    Modality & PossibilityPersonal Identity
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Biological taxa are clades defined by shared descent from a common ancestral group.
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    • 2.Membership in a clade is a necessary, not contingent, relation.
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    • 3.Clade membership is grounded in historical descent, not in intrinsic morphological or qualitative features.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Intrinsic homeostatic property clusters—not historical lineage—explain why species members share stable, causally integrated trait suites.
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    • 2.Boyd's HPC theory grounds natural kind membership in shared underlying mechanisms, making historical descent explanatorily redundant for biological classification.
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    • 3.If two organisms share identical HPC mechanisms via convergent evolution, excluding them from the same kind on historical grounds reflects taxonomy, not metaphysical essence.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Ghiselin and Hull's thesis that species are individuals rather than kinds undermines the claim that species possess essences at all, historical or otherwise.
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    • 2.Individuals have no essential properties in the way kinds do—they have contingent histories, so ascribing historical essences to species conflates individual persistence conditions with kind membership criteria.
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    Related

    Biological taxa are clades defined by shared descent from a common ancestral gro...Boyd's HPC theory grounds natural kind membership in shared underlying mechanism...Clade membership is grounded in historical descent, not in intrinsic morphologic...Ghiselin and Hull's thesis that species are individuals rather than kinds underm...
    +4 moreShow less
    If two organisms share identical HPC mechanisms via convergent evolution, exclud...Individuals have no essential properties in the way kinds do—they have contingen...Intrinsic homeostatic property clusters—not historical lineage—explain why speci...Membership in a clade is a necessary, not contingent, relation.

    Similar

    Natural kinds require distinctive intrinsic natural properties common ...83%The traditional concept of natural kinds requires instantiation of int...82%Membership in a species is determined by relational properties (lineag...82%If species are individuals, intrinsic properties cannot individuate th...82%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: natural-kinds
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    However, Kripke (1980) himself argues that a person’s parentage is essential to them. If that is so, then if individual S is descended from N, then S is necessarily descended from N. McGinn (1976) suggests that this extends to species also. LaPorte (2004) argues that essentialism holds with respect to facts relating individuals, species, and other taxa to the higher taxa (genus and above) within which they are nested. These taxa are clades, that is to say kinds defined by shared descent from a c
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit