Can Aristotle be Reconciled with Darwin

Abstract

We scientists have good reasons to admire both Aristotle and Darwin. Each produced a series of remarkable contributions to knowledge which, even where outdated in certain respects, manifest extraordinary profundity of thinking and solidity of judgment. Not everybody has been so fortunate, especially certain of our contemporaries who have attempted to reconcile the two by intellectual brute force. One might think that, thanks to Darwin if nobody else, Aristotelian essences would have gone the way of final causes, natural place, and the vegetative soul. Mayr (1982) and Bernier (1984) have nonetheless represented their own interpretations of Aristotle's essentialism in a most favorable light. They go considerably beyond saying that Aristotle's essentialism is less bad than Plato's, and try to make it compatible with modern evolutionary thinking. Thus, Mayr (1982) equated DNA with the Unmoved Mover; as is common knowledge, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover is God (see Metaphysics, Book 12). Bernier (1984), on the other hand, made the genotype an organism's essence. Such views are anachronistic and probably will not gain a large following. However, Bernier's paper contains many serious errors of fact as well as interpretation, including false statements about my views. Bernier (1984:463) alleged that, although I have destroyed the traditional basis for taxonomy, I have done so without providing another one to replace it. She ignored much of what I and others have published on these matters. In the first place, I devoted a book (Ghiselin, 1969) to the philosophical interpretation of Darwinism, wherein I explained the thesis that species are individuals and discussed the relationship of this new ontology to essentialism. In another book (Ghiselin, 1974), I developed a radical individualism that allows us to do away with teleology altogether, and showed how the new ontology helps us to reason effectively about adaptation. Bernier (1984:464) asserted that I did not explain how to define species ostensively. Actually, I made this quite clear in a paper which she cited (Ghiselin, 1981:271). The obvious answer is by type designation, as provided for in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Of course, developing and explicating the new ontology takes a certain amount of time, but quite a number of us have been working on it (see especially Wiley, 1981). I have applied it to a wide range of topics, including psychology (Ghiselin, 1981) and literary theory (Ghiselin, 1980). Bernier (1984:462) said that, given the scope of what I treat as individuals, any identifiable reality would be one. This again contradicts what I explicitly asserted (Ghiselin, 1981:305). All sorts of entities have to be interpreted as classes, not individuals: the cell, the species category, and the breadbox. Bernier (1984:462) asked Given such a broad spectrum does there exist any ontological reality that is not an individual? Obviously, a nominalist