The Nature of a Species in Relation to Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism
This ten-page undergraduate paper examines the nature of a species in relation to essentialism and anti-essentialism. The author notes that the modern evolutionary view of biological species has been derived from Darwin and Wallace, is sometimes called “population thinking,” and is a direct challenge to essentialism. In their anti-essentialism form, the assumptions made by population thinkers are diametrically opposed to those made by typologists or essentialists, for the population thinker emphasizes the uniqueness of everything in the organic world.
