Abstract
This essay in the “anthropology of science” is
about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The
example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the
very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the
historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think
about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have
similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based,
species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and
higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in structure
and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of
entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. These
structures are routine products of our “habits of mind,”
which may in part be naturally selected to grasp relevant and
recurrent “habits of the world.” An experiment illustrates
that the same taxonomic rank is preferred for making biological
inferences in two diverse populations: Lowland Maya and Midwest
Americans. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models
of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures
prefer species-like groups, although Americans have relatively little
actual knowledge or experience at this level. This supports a modular
view of folk biology as a core domain of human knowledge and as a
special player, or “core meme,” in the selection processes
by which cultures evolve. Structural aspects of folk taxonomy provide
people in different cultures with the built-in constraints and
flexibility that allow them to understand and respond appropriately to
different cultural and ecological settings. Another set of reasoning
experiments shows that Maya, American folk, and scientists use
similarly structured taxonomies in somewhat different ways to extend
their understanding of the world in the face of uncertainty. Although
folk and scientific taxonomies diverge historically, they continue to
interact. The theory of evolution may ultimately dispense with the
core concepts of folk biology, including species, taxonomy, and
teleology; in practice, however, these may remain indispensable to
doing scientific work. Moreover, theory-driven scientific knowledge
cannot simply replace folk knowledge in everyday life. Folk-biological
knowledge is not driven by implicit or inchoate theories of the sort
science aims to make more accurate and perfect.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Behavioral Neuroscience,Physiology,Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Cited by
438 articles.
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