Distorting the History of Evolutionary Thought in Conceptual Development Research

Abstract

In two very interesting articles published in this journal (Shtulman & Schulz, 2008;Ware & Gelman, 2014), the history of evolutionary thought has been distorted.The main aim of this letter is not to criticize the authors of these articles that report significant findings on the content of students' preconceptions about evolution.However, these articles also present some perspectives on the history of evolutionary thought, overlooking important later counter-arguments in the literature on history and philosophy of science.Therefore, the aim of this letter is to explain why this is the case, and to urge researchers in cognitive science and conceptual development to pay more attention to the details of scholarship from history and philosophy of science because these could be important for their conclusions.In their abstract, Shtulman and Schulz (2008) start with the following sentence: "Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection."Then, in their introduction they further argue that: "Many historians of science, including Gould (1996), Hull (1965), and Mayr (1982), have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as a primary obstacle to the discovery of natural selection.According to these scholars, an essentialist construal of species led pre-Darwinian theorists to ignore or devalue within-species variation" (p.1050).Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case.As Wilkins (2013, p. 397) explains in detail, this so-called Essentialism Story is not historically accurate.While it is true that scholars often wrote about the essences of life, of organs, etc., they never accepted that species had to have jointly necessary and severally sufficient conditions, or that members of a species should bear essential properties.Wilkins also puts the arguments made by Hull and Mayr in their historical context, explaining how their account of pre-Darwinian essentialism was developed, and notes that more recently several scholars have questioned the accuracy of the Essentialism Story (Amundson, 2005, p.

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