Essentialism

by Newnameelizabeth

I thought I had posted this earlier today. It goes before my latest post.

Chapter 1, part 2 of Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth

Surprisingly, Dawkins does not blame religion for evolution’s slow emergence. He blames Plato’s Essentialism, which is the belief that things are imperfect instances of their perfect forms. Thus individual rabbits are instances of essential rabbitness. Children are natural essentialists. Evolution flies against it as it posits that all things are fluidly shape shifting into something else, and that they aren’t part of any stable, creaturely telos.

He goes on to state that the common ancestor of rabbits and leopards was a “shrew-like animal we’ll call the ‘hairpin bend’. We don’t know what it looks like, but it follows from the evolutionary view that it definitely had to exist.”

You just lost me. Again, the mythical common ancestor supported by circular logic comes to the rescue.

To me Plato formulated (haha) the notion, but surely this is how the writers of Genesis (Great Courses influences me again. I am fine with it just being Moses though) conceived animals, as instances of stable creatureliness where animals reproduce only their own kind.