Despite the promise of a post-racial science, debates over the meaning and implications of race and population differences have persisted, albeit in transformed terms. Given that they eschew fixed genetic differences, ‘biosocial’ perspectives on race have brought with them a renewed focus on the social, historical, and political bases of contemporary health disparities. However, the move away from reference to fixed genes in describing how racial health disparities emerge or are maintained is not without problems. In this chapter, we first challenge the notion that the embrace of environmentally driven effects is inherently progressive, through an examination of the longue durée of pre-modern racial typologies. Second, we review recent research within DOHaD and environmental epigenetics that addresses racial health disparities. Our review reflects our concern that postgenomics has the potential to catalyse new forms of essentialism and typological thinking. Studies in our review hew closely to essentialist forms of racial thought, albeit now marked by methylation differences and adverse early life conditions. To avoid the return of racialised typological thinking, we suggest methodological interventions and various research orientations, such as interdisciplinarity, that can prevent a return to notions of fixed racial difference

In the decades following the forging of the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis in the 1940s, a number of its philosophical defenders created a myth about what Charles Darwin was up against, a viewpoint called “typological essentialism” often attributed to Aristotle. In this chapter I first sketch the history of how this myth was created. I then establish that it is a myth by providing an account of Aristotle’s essentialism as it is actually displayed in his philosophy of biology and in his biological practice. It has nothing to do with the ‘mythic’ version. We then turn to what Darwin was really up against—a creationist anti-evolutionary way of defining the species concept that was common in Darwin’s time (that owes nothing to Aristotle), and to his attempts to re-orient thinking about it. I will close by reconsidering Aristotle and Charles Darwin: Does it make any sense to think about the relationship between two thinkers separated by more than two millennia living in such vastly different cultures? What did Charles Darwin himself think about Aristotle?

It is suggested that current religious studies are distorted by what sociologists sometimes call recipe knowledge, especially in relation to the common assumption – still partially valid – that religion should no longer be seen in essentialist or perennialist terms. The possibility of neo-perennialism is explored. Widespread assumptions about projecting onto faith traditions ‘essentialist’ understandings are critiqued, particularly in relation to Buddhism, and common assumptions about the inapplicability of terms such as religion and myth are questioned. In this context, evolutionary perspectives are important because ‘dual process’ notions of human cognition may be applied to the historical development of human religiosity. This means that a revived recognition of a universal aspect of human religiosity is necessary, based not on very questionable anthropological speculations of the kind that became common in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries but on current exploration of brain functioning and of its evolutionary development.

In this chapter, I present a Kripkean argument against the materialist thesis that intentionality supervenes on the physical. The argument is inspired both by Kripke’s remarks on the essential nature of intentionality in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, and his argument against the identification of mind and body in Naming and Necessity. The argument turns on the metaphysical possibility of quadders and zombies, where quadders are minimal physical duplicates of us who mean quaddition rather than addition by “plus,” and where zombies are minimal physical duplicates of us whose thought and talk are altogether devoid of intentionality.

This chapter explores metamorphosis by focusing on the so-called ‘shearwaters of Diomedea’ – a group of seabirds whose odd behaviour recalls their previous existence as humans. It puts these birds in conversation with other humans-turned-animals both ancient and modern and investigates how they reflect on the experience of transformation. The chapter reveals that both ancient and modern tales of metamorphosis draw on the notion of hybridity in so far as many of the creatures undergoing such a transformation are, in effect, hybrids: they retain part of their human identity while also sporting the body of an animal. At the same time the chapter points to an important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking the human. It shows that modern tales of metamorphosis tend to explore the dissolution of the boundary that separates the human from all other animals. The ancient conversation, by contrast, returns to – and ultimately affirms – the positions of some of the Greek philosophers arguing for an essential human difference.

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

Chapter two is dedicated to the complicated contemporary debate on the notion of biological species. After a short introduction and critical analysis of all major relational and intrinsic definitions of species, special attention is paid to the recent revival of the essentialist species concept, both in its contemporary and classical Aristotelian-Thomistic formulations, tested against the two major arguments denying their compatibility with evolutionary biology.

In this chapter, I explore the role of the concept of inner purposiveness in the final section of Hegel’s Logic and also the Philosophy of Nature. Hegel defends the claim that the concept is meaningfully applied to living organisms, particularly animals. The concept is actually used precisely where we should expect it, given the argument of ‘Teleology’, both when talking about the internal organisation of animals in parts-organs and when talking about the self-repair or regeneration processes by which they stay alive. By contrast, the concept no longer dominates the description of the natural process that Hegel designates ‘process of the genus’ (or ‘generic process’), in which he considers that natural life is ultimately submitted to externality. I argue that this application and lack of application taken together confirm my views on ‘Teleology’.

This chapter presents the general argument of the book and its main methodological assumptions. The book offers a close reading of the examination of the concept of purpose in The Science of Logic. The concept is understood abstractly, but nevertheless as a causal concept, by means of which we think about what the intrinsic reference to an end means and implies. The chapter clarifies in what sense the approach developed in this book is metaphysical and also what the importance of a better appreciation of Hegel’s chapter on this concept for a correct understanding of the goals and, particularly, the achievements of his entire Science of Logic is.

Every textbook of biology will supply a number of ‘modes of speciation’, the ways in which new species evolve. But the issues in dispute among the biologists themselves are rather odd. The adoption of evolutionary theory by biologists has had a great impact on how species are understood. From the idea that kinds of living beings were created and at best had devolved to localised varieties, now species were the target of a ‘mechanical’ or ‘physiological’ explanation: they came into being. And under Darwin’s version of the evolutionary account (initially known as the ‘development theory’, since the Latin word evolutio means ‘development’), species were made from other, allied (which means ‘closely related’), species. The processes and causes of new species set up the ‘species question’ that Darwin and other naturalists were seeking to answer.

What are species worth? Do they have inherent value or are they just of value to human beings? Do they have rights? Does their integrity as species have moral worth, and do we have a duty to preserve them, or to modify them? Are species of utilitarian or instrumental value? These are the questions that the third great topic of philosophy seeks to answer: axiology – the values of things, and the duties they impose upon us as ethical, economic and aesthetic beings.

For a long time, species have been thought to be the index marker for healthy ecosystems, for undisturbed nature and for conservation, but the reasons why have varied considerably. National Parks developed from a desire to maintain potential sources of timber, game and hunting opportunities in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth century, as demonstrated in Teddy Roosevelt’s book The Wilderness Hunter; An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle.

It’s not enough to just list the clusters in the living world. One also needs to group clusters together within larger clusters. This process is sometimes referred to as ‘ordering the world’, and is called taxonomy, from the Greek word for ‘order’, taxis. In traditional taxonomy, begun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and formalised in the eighteenth century by Carl Linnaeus, this meant that species were grouped together in groups called in Latin genera (that’s the plural; the singular is genus). As a result, Linnaeus gave each species a two-part name (a binomial): its genus name (which always has a capital initial) and its species ‘epithet’ (which is always in lowercase). So, our species binomial is Homo sapiens; we are the species sapiens in the genus Homo. It’s kind of like a street address – you have the ‘general’ name (the ‘street’) and the ‘specific’ name (the ‘house number’) (see Box 2.1)

There are several ‘enigmatic canid’ species in North America. One of them is the red wolf (Canis rufus, Figure 1.1), and another is the Great Lakes Wolf. Red wolves are seriously endangered, with a re-released population in North Carolina and breeding programmes being the last populations. Red wolves weren’t even studied closely until the 1960s, after having been hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The title of this book is Understanding Species, and I have spoken at length about what we understand species to be and to mean. Now, though, I would like to ruminate for a bit on the ‘understanding’ part.

To understand something is not necessarily to have the One True Answer. Human knowledge, and especially its concepts, is in a state of flux at all times. Sometimes, this is because we are learning new things about what the concept refers to, as is the so-called rule in science (it sometimes isn’t). At other times it is because the concept no longer means anything (like ‘phlogiston’ in chemistry or ‘vital force’ in biology). But sometimes it is because the concept has been included into the ‘what everybody knows’ segment of culture. John Maynard Smith, a famous and influential British evolutionary biologist, called this the Bellman’s Theorem (from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark): ‘what I tell you three times is true’.

As I have noted, terms for species are at best polysemic (that is, they are a single word in a language with multiple and often incompatible meanings), and at worst species is a term with no meaning of any real scientific importance. Now we will consider several replacement concepts, and the evolutionary and genetic considerations that make them seemingly viable.

In Chapter 2 we considered the extent of the different definitions as applied to a simplified version of human evolution and genetics. One of those definitions included a historical aspect – monophyly.