The metaphysics of species determinism in biology

I - Introduction.

The present essay is an attempt at clarifying the distinction between the being of the individual thing and the being of the species the individual thing is usually said to belong to, with a special focus on the relevance of this issue in the field of biology. In fact, while so called classical essentialism has fallen into disgrace both in theoretical biology and philosophy^[1], species determinism still holds a tight grip on our culture, ethics, scientific practice, and politics, in the form of historical materialism. We will explore historical materialism in detail, as it constitutes the assumed method and metaphysics of evolutionary biology, the science of the origin of species. Nonetheless, species determinism remains our main target.

I hope this text provides not only conceptual clarification, but tools we can use to unmask ideologies and, most importantly, defend ourselves from them. En passant, it should be noticed that the critique of essentialism or species determinism does not contradict or invalidate the question concerning “human nature”, or rather, “what it means to be human”.

II - Classical essentialism.

What do we mean by essentialism? Essentialism is the belief that a thing is how it is, and can be in such and such way - or to put it in different terms, is and can be predicated to be such and such - in virtue of its essence. The essence of a thing determines what the thing is, so that it cannot but be that thing as long as it exists at all. For example, a (living^[2]) honey bee can be subjected to a number of (more or less extreme) determinations (it can lose its wings, it can be affected by a pathology, it can be tired, it can be in its hive or it can be trapped in a jar), but 1) none of these determinations contradicts its being a honey bee, and 2) the bee can affected by these accidental determinations (and not by other ones - for example, a bee cannot swim, it cannot feel existential despair, it cannot perform photosynthesis, it cannot be as big as a human) exactly because it’s a bee. The essence of a thing first and foremost determines the thing’s possibilities, and among these, those possibilities which must be actual for the thing to actually exist as what it is (a bee does not have to harvest pollen from flowers to be a bee, but it might have to have bee DNA^[3]). What this implies is the absolute precedence of the essence over the individual thing: the essence is before any concrete instance which is determined by that essence. Essences are eternal. Consequently, the essence cannot possibly change in virtue of what happens to those instances: infact, whatever life the individual things live, it is either determined as confirming or being indifferent towards the essence (the thing remains itself and continues to live) or as negating it, and therefore negating the existence of the thing itself.

By calling  essentialism a form of species determinism, I mean to show a crucial element of this way of conceiving a (living) thing’s being: that the species not only determines what a thing can and cannot do and be, but also what it is bound (deterministically) to do and be. However, the most problematic aspect of this conception does not reside in its determinism (we do not assume a causal relation between the species and its instances, but rather that the first is the mere condition of possibility of the second - if a bee has to exist as a bee, it must be such and such, but its existence is contingent: bees can go extinct, bee-ness cannot), but in the concept of species. While the concept is formally necessary in itself, its concrete interpretation is not: what are species? To be more precise: are species real, natural, objective, or are they fictive, conventional, subjective? Do they define the natural joints^[4] of the world, or do we more or less arbitrarily cut nature into parts ourselves? If the latter was the case, this species determinism would be just another form of anthropomorphic determinism, this time meaning that we determine what and how things can do and be in order to be what we expect them to be, in order to fit into the conventional joints we carved ourselves.

Given the formal structure of essentialism as we have described it, I think there is one major clue leading to a (far from neutral) conventionalist interpretation: the normative character of essentialism, which excludes what is strange while admitting it a strange - not enough to be normal, but enough to be actively excluded and being determined by its own exclusion. According to the form of essentialism, as we will see, such a status should not be possible - and yet we are always distinguishing normal from strange, “a proper x” from “not a real x” which is also close enough to remain in its own limbo. The excluded is never really fully excluded to the point of indifference - for this reason, we should probably ask ourselves what role this exclusion itself plays in the formation of the species (the normality) the thing is excluded from. Why doesn’t essentialism formally allow this status?

As we have seen, essentialism dictates that a thing can be determined in a number of possible ways. Some of these determinations are necessary for the thing to exist (for example, a bee has to be composed of living cells), some are in contradiction with the existence of the thing (being crushed is not compatible with a bee’s existence), some are indifferent (a bee will equally be a bee no matter if it is a queen or a worker). Among the indifferent determinations, some will be way more common than others. Most bees bring flower nectar to their hive. If a bee doesn’t, it will exist as a bee which doesn’t bring flower nectar to its hive, and only insofar as it exists as a bee, it is possible for it not to bring the nectar to its hive, and for us to understand - through scientific inquiry for example - why, as a bee, it isn’t acting like all the other bees of the hive. We shall note that the negative effects of not bringing flower nectar to the hive for the existence of the bee and the other ones does not make that bee less of a bee. One one hand, it is essentially possible for the bee to starve itself to death. On the other hand, if we assume that all the determinations which do not favour the existence of a thing sort of de-essentialize it, we should conclude that no bee is ever fully a bee, as all bees are subjected to the action of the hostile environment.^[5] But we recognise bees, and indeed all living beings, as being most itself in their struggle for survival, which necessarily includes both success and failure as essential possibilities.

Apparently, species would naturally include a great deal of diversity. Such is the strength of an essence: for any being thing, as long as it is (and lives), its essence guarantees that it is what it is, fully and absolutely. No bee will ever not be quite a bee. No human will ever not be quite a human. What this means is that, as a living being, if humans are what they are in virtue of something like a human essence or human nature, no human can lack that essence, and most importantly, any difference between individual humans can only be determined accidentally, and never by “degrees” of possession of essential properties. If human essence resided in its rationality, as per tradition, every human would be, per genus proximum et differentiam specificam, animal rationale - no one excluded. Three important conclusions have to be drawn. 1) No one can be essentially determined by their very exclusion - no “irrational rational animal” can ever be given. In fact, such a determination could never be essential, as the loss of the alleged essential property (therefore becoming a fully rational animal) would not lead to the end of such a human, contradicting the major formal character of essentialism. 2) No one’s nature can ever be determined by contrast with that of the excluded human, which is to say, by the exclusion of someone else. In fact, not only such a determination would be clearly circular (a petitio principii ), but it would either be completely empty or eventually subordinated to the definition of the excluded. 3) No one can ever be excluded until they are, exist and live: if the loss of essential properties leads to the destruction of the thing, we should think twice and then desist when we trying to prove that someone has indeed lost their ratio (their specific difference) - any apparent loss of ratio has either to be reconsidered in other terms or an essential possibility of human nature itself (so that humans would be the only animals that can lose their reason, being the only animal rationale there is).

It goes without saying, our society, our politics and our philosophy have systematically violated these three consequences. The identity of an arbitrary and accidental class of humans (namely, white western cisgender heterosexual bourgeois neurotypical and able-bodied men) has been determined as being not only prototypical, but, as in full ownership of its own essential possibilities, able of the fullest and most virtuous activity permitted to humans. In this way, the othered categories (BIPOC, non western people, women, gender non-comforming people, gay people, neurodivergent and disabled people, and last but not last, poor people^[6]) have been excluded as naturally lacking those (intellectual and moral) abilities necessary to achieve “full humanity”. Whether the arbitrary concept of human nature came logically and historically before or after the individuation of the privileged class of humans (as its cause or as its consequence), and to what extent this concept was determined through the exclusion of the other (whether they were excluded a priori or as a consequence), are crucial problems, but they can’t be dealt with here. The answer probably mainly depends on whether we commit to an “idealist” (the idea and its history precedes and determines power relations) or a “materialist” (vice versa) view of history.

In light of the clear contradiction between the form of essentialism and its application, we can safely say that essentialism has been an attempt at determining the natural joints of the world so poor and biased that it ended up leaving out more than what it saved at best, a colonialist fraud at worst.

III - Historical materialism.

III.I - Matter and time.

As I have anticipated, classical essentialism is mostly considered dead anyway. It is an established opinion that it was killed by Darwin, or rather, by the theory of evolution by natural selection (TENS) accounting for the origin of species. The phrase “origin of species” immediately shows its stark opposition to essentialism: essences, species, must be eternal, they cannot “originate”. For this reason essentialism has been accused of having restrained and curbed the progress of western science and philosophy for centuries.^[7] Evolutionism and essentialism do not get along, and the striking force of scientific evidence wins over an ever weaker metaphysical paradigm. In the words of Marc Ereshefsky, evolutionary biology marked “the death of essentialism”: “from a biological perspective, species essentialism is no longer a plausible position”^[8]. However, species essentialism survives under a new guise.

To understand the transition between essentialism and historical materialism, we need to give a preliminary interpretation of what is really determined in the distinction between the being of the individual thing and the being of the species the individual thing is said to belong to. One one hand we have the “individual thing”, that is to say, the living being.^[9] A living being lives as the living being that it is, according to its own being (which isn’t but a way of saying, according to its own living). A bee lives as a bee, and being a bee isn’t different from living as a bee (living bee-ly, so to say). However, this is not a mere tautology: to live as a bee is very different from living as a pine tree or as a E. coli biofilm. Something determines all the possible determinations of the living being - what and how a bee can and cannot do and be, and so on. In classical essentialism, eternal essences play such a role. They determine the legislation to which every being belonging to them is subjected to - they determine their truth, what we ought to know about them. Such a truth is eternal, and it is, in a sense, self-sufficient, originary. In the Christian context, for example, natural species reside in God’s mind. God has always already created the species, and the creatures which belong to this or that species only instantiate, generation after generation, the already established truth of their own species. A bee is determined the way it is because “God said so”. Even without bringing God into play, saying that a bee behaves in this and that way because it’s a bee isn’t just tautological, but assumes that something like a “essence of bee” exists, so that a bee (this living being) can be (according to its essence) a bee (an instance of the bee species). A bee is a bee in a very specifical metaphysical sense.

Now, this metaphysical sense, in a way, changes with the death of essentialism, which announced and preceded Nietzsche’s death of God by more than one century, with the birth of profane, anti-religious thought. Perhaps essentialism was already dying when Buffon published his Histoire naturelle^[10], which, from an essentialist point of view, is a title as contradictory as On the origin of species. Some decades later, Lamarck’s theory of evolution was still characterized by “metaphysical” elements such as the spontaneous germination of life, or the inevitable direction of evolution towards complexity^[11], but the deed was done and darwinism was inevitable^[12]: species are born (speciate), change (evolve), and possibly die (go extinct). Moreover, the causes of these processes, which take place in enormous spans of time, are wholly material. A bee is a bee, but the sense of its being is now different. In particular, its truth, its species determinism, is grounded on two metaphysical principles alone: matter and time. As we will see, even ignoring the evident more or less intentional ideological distortions of the evolutionism^[13], the risks concerning anthropomorphism are inherent to the formal structure of historical materialism.

TENS dictates that a living being is what it is and how it is because of its evolutionary history. Its traits emerged more or less accidentally in the past and, thanks (mostly) to selective pressure and given enough time, they eventually swept into fixation.^[14] Two elements are present in this equation: matter and time.

Matter stands for the absolute contingency of the shapes living beings can take. At the same time, it is the dominion of mechanical / efficient causation, as it is described by physical laws. Now,

“The mechanical laws do not privilege any particular organization over another; hence, if the organization were to be explained with merely mechanical laws, the organization of organisms could only be judged to be the result of chance”^[15].

If we are to understand why living beings live the way they do and provide an answer which goes beyond the mere “a bee lives like this because bees are like this by chance”, biology faces the task of providing an understanding of “the lawfulness”, or “the lawlikeness of the contingent as such”^[16]. To be more precise, what is to be understood is how the substantiality of species emerges from the accidental determinations of matter, that is to say, from the materiality of life.

We should consider species “substantial” in two senses. 1) From the point of view of the single living being, the species provides it with a “determination substrate”, the basic determinations that allows it to be determined in a plurality of accidental ways (for example, a cat’s adaptive instinct to hide allows it to crouch while hunting or sit in a box while at home - and no other animal sits in a box like a cat). 2) From the point of view of evolution itself, the species determines and constrains possible future evolutionary paths (for example, birds can evolved from dinosaurs, but insects could never evolve from mammals).

The classical relationship between form and matter is thus clearly inverted. However, any process that fixates traits and/or leads to speciation is equally material, and therefore comprehensible only in terms of physical laws. A merely materialist view of evolution would not be able to account for what it is thought to be the clear product of evolution - not chaotic configurations unworthy of being known in scientific terms, but actual species, each one providing us with an scientific understanding of the life the living beings of that species live. We immediately see order instead of chaos. Another principle is needed and presupposed, and this principle is time - a very specific interpretation of time, which allows TENS to be materialist and provide a concept of species determination.

It is important to clarify that evolutionary biology (nor any other historicist philosophy) has not explicitly recognised this concept of time. This disavowal is constitutive of the science itself: not only, as a post-metaphysical profane philosophy, it cannot admit to rely on a full blown metaphysical determinism in order to justify the object of its own research (the origin of species), but, just as much as classical essentialism, this profane metaphysics isn’t free from issues of method. The problem of anthropomorphism (whether we are looking at the natural joints of the world or we are carving them ourselves) does not go away just because we derive, deduce, prove or justify species through their (material) evolutionary history.

III.II - Time-determinism and the anthropomorphic historical materialist method.

Firstly, we have to understand what role time plays. Secondly, we will see how time is exactly a solution to the problem of anthropomorphism - an attempt at finding what we see in living beings into their objective natural history.

Time is to be understood as that principle which, so to say, pulls forms out of matter. Time derives the determining and substantial (the species) from the indifferent and accidental (a variation which might or might not arise, sweep into fixation, being cancelled by genetic drift, not be inherited at all and so on). A first superficial interpretation of this concept can be that, as we say, “with time” small invisible changes become bigger and evident. As Lamarck put it:

“Thanks to the uninterrupted concurrence of such causes (or laws of nature), a long time, and an almost unimaginable number of environmental influences, living bodies of every order were subsequently formed”^[17].

The “long time” Lamarck refers to here (and in other places in the same discourse) is just another word for the prolonged repetition of the same mechanical causes and processes over time. Time itself is not acknowledged as a cause, but it’s reduced to the condition of possibility of this repetition, or rather, the duration itself of this repetition, therefore as the mere “intensity” of the forming causes. A species, the configuration shared by a group of living beings, is then a collection of traits materially produced by a collection (concurrence) of causes. The more complex it is, the longer it takes for it to change dramatically.

However, how such an uninterrupted concurrence can produce something like a species (instead of a contingent and epistemically irrelevant order of matter), remains obscure. The answer is time. Time makes those causes productive - causes (mutation, selective pressure, genetic drift, exaptation and so on) are productive only because they are temporal - species are inherently temporal products. Only insofar as they are temporal, species can be studied and can explain why living beings are the way they are. What this means is that every “essential” determination of a living being (for example, why bees are eusocial insects, why they have wings, why their wings are the way they are) has its origin in some point of the material history of that species (or rather, of the configurations that species descends from), that is to say, in the arisal of accidental determinations which became substantial. Species are substances - not in the classical sense, but as historical substances. Their substantiality (which, as we have seen, determines the actual determinations of living beings and the possibility of our scientific knowledge) is temporal. In other words, the truth of a species is expressed in its history. Every new adaptation, variation of a trait, loss of a trait, exaptation etc. has a reason - which isn’t necessarily inherently meaningful (traits can be fixated by chance or despite being maladaptive), but provides us with an understanding of what’s going on in the life of a living being. For example, the apparently same organ is to be understood differently if it’s an adaptation or a functional cooptation of a preexisting trait which was differently adaptive or non adaptive at all.^[18]

Now, clearly our understanding of species is historical. For this very reason, it is affected by the fundamental problem of any historicism: the history we write to account for a present phenomenon (be it present or past or even a foreseen future) is always its projection into the past, or rather, the anthropomorphic projection of what we already know about that phenomenon, or what we see in it, into the temporal determination that gave rise to it.^[19]

Without any doubt, this problem concerns first of all our ideological writing of history. Any historiography is written to justify and present a certain order, project or event as necessary. “History requires it.” This doesn’t hold only for our human Geistesgeschichte: evolutionary biology is equally affected, especially and mostly when the explanandum is homo sapiens.

The case of evolutionary psychology (aka sociobiology, the science that gives adaptive explanation to socially relevant human traits) is probably the most infamous one, but we should firstly notice that ideological distortions are a substantial risk regardless of the political colour. David C. Queller emphasised how an ideological critique of sociobiology is baseless since sociobiology can both emphasise the adaptive nature of what we would consider to be “right wing” and “left wing” characters. The only discriminating factor would be scientific objectivity.^[20] The problem with this defence is that it deduces the wrong consequence from the right premise. It is true that an evolutionary account can display as “belonging to the species itself” any present character no matter its ideological interpretation. What this means is, however, that evolutionary accounts are exactly justifications of what we already see in present living (human) beings. Even “neutral” accounts, as they display the will to keep the explained character free from ideological connotations (as if to say: “in truth, this trait has no ideological relevance in itself”), are ideologically determined, as they are grounded on the assumption that the explanandum is, indeed, neutral. Of course, the ability of constructing ad hoc historical evolutionary explanations is not unlimited, but it’s constrained by objective data. However, their interpretation as material causes is possible only in light of their effects, and the effects themselves are always pre-interpreted, so that the search for causes is made possible. In this way, explanandum and explanans end up overlapping. To use Nietzsche’s words, any historicist account stands “between tautology and absurdity”^[21].

We’ve come now to the central issue of method, beyond the risks of ideology. Historical materialism produces a history of “effects in themselves”^[22]. Such effects are exactly the species, the evolved in itself. We can now finally see how time answers to the problem of anthropomorphism.

What do we see when we look at these effects, the species? We face an antinomy. 1) On one hand, the materialist profane method presents us the living being as a merely mechanical process, with visible past causes and present effects, a bête machine, so that its species is only an a posteriori grouping. 2) On the other hand, the striking continuity (like begets like) and order (adaptations, ecosystems etc.) of the living world suggests that species - what we recognise living beings to be - are indeed something determining, real, and most importantly necessary to understand living beings themselves. A bee lives as a bee, and we need to understand what a bee is in order to understand the life of a single bee. Now, I claim that in this second way of looking at the living, we still see it as an effect, but not as a present mechanical effect of a past mechanical cause, but rather, as a present final effect of a future final cause.^[23] The final cause of a living being is nothing different from its own life, but it is already qualified, that is to say, determined by its species. Every autopoietic or homeostatic account (for example) of a living being’s life, development, behaviour etc. resides on this kind of species determinism: the homeostasis of a bee is very different from that of a human. In Kant’s words: “For we adduce a teleological ground when we ascribe causality in regard to an object to a concept of the object as if it were to be found in nature (not in us)”^[24].

This antinomy was already recognised exactly by Kant in his Critique of Judgement, where he eventually surrendered to the “inscrutability” of the organising principle of life.^[25] In doing so, “rather than grounding the possibility of a science of living being, [he] denie[d] the very possibility of it”^[26]. Kant was, so to say, caught in between the ending christian essentialism and the still yet to rise historical materialism. The materiality of profane science and the essentialism of the naturalist gaze are irreconcilable, and a “Newton of a blade of grass”^[27] was not possible.

Yet. It was the very theory of evolution to provide a solution to this antinomy. Time is the reconciling principle of matter and form. Time allows us to project the form, the concept, we find in nature as a final effect, into the materiality of efficient mechanical causes: the past causes and processes are shaped so that they cannot be understood without referring to the concept of the species they produce. What we are presented with is a kind of “double reversed time”: the historical causes are interpreted as leading to the present configuration (from past to present) - and therefore as its causes - only because we know what to search for in the first place (from the present to the past). What this means is that the caused is already present in its causes, the explanandum is already present in the explanans. Far from being a weakening contradiction, this is the source of the strength of time as the fundamental hidden metaphysical ἀρχή that makes evolutionary biology as a historical materialist science possible. If the new configuration is already present in the causal process leading to its genesis (for example, as dispersed in mutations, selective pressures, evolutionary constraints etc.), shaping it as its legitimate explanans, we see how the production of the substantial from the accidental is not contradictory, but necessary. What presents itself as an accidental and indifferent effect (so that no evolutionary future can be foreseen from it - for example, an environmental change), appears, at the other end of the historical process, as a necessity - not as a destiny (as it’s the case of christian metaphysics), but as wholly mechanical and blind causal process, which leads to speciation only “over time”. By reconstructing one species’ truth as its evolutionary past, evolutionary biology overcomes the substantial emptiness of classical essentialist accounts. An evolutionary past is in fact the concurrence of perscrutable material causes elevated to the rank of species determinism through the metaphysical action of time, that is to say, through the historicization of such causes. Such material causes qualify the living being we see: such is the fundamental meaning of historical materialist species determinism.

En passant, we could note how such a determinism may seem to allow, unlike essentialism, a level of normativity, or a concept of normality and abnormality. What “evolved”, what got fixated - in other words, what survived - dictates what is normal and proper to the species, and anything deviating is exactly a merely accidental variation - possibly a maladaptive mutation.^[28] However, such a point of view assumes a position probably even worse than essentialist normativity. By disavowing the fact that every change is, in a way, abnormal - for example, every mutation is a risk, as it could lead to great advantage as well as total failure -, it distinguishes between past “good” change and present “bad” change. In doing so, it turns the evolutionary perspective into a fundamentally conservative one. Unrestrained species determinism claims to say what a living being should be, but its object is essentially past, and therefore it can legitimately only say what it has been. The risk of the disavowal of the “free” and “negative”, “open” aspect of evolution - the irreducibility of the single living being to its species, the inherent risk that every new life embodies - is essential to the very form of evolutionary biology.

III.III - What we miss about evolution: the self-cancellation of the unspeciated.

Insofar as it studies the origin of species, the object of evolutionary biology is always already an “effect in itself”, an evolved, an adapted, a survivor even. The present configuration can be evolutionarily understood only through the evolutionary process that brought it into existence. Empirical variations aside^[29], all speciation events imply a double cancellation of the precedent configuration. What we mean is not necessarily something akin to the phylogenetic or cladistic concept of species (which implies that 1) every speciation event is also an extinction event and 2) species themselves cannot evolve).^[30] In every speciation, what is “material” in a species (in a way, the very living beings instantiating, or actually being, the species itself, whose materiality is determined by the form itself) produces the new species (thanks to time, which makes the concurrence of causes productive), acquiring new traits and losing old ones (even if most remain unchanged, and even traits such as “not-having-this-trait”^[31]). The old traits themselves become old only in their being lost, and only insofar as they are lost, they stop constituting the form or concept of the species. But in order for the new traits to actually be new traits of a new species, instead of mere material variations of an already existing species (there existing at the same level of the “old” traits), they can’t but be thought of in relationship with the old traits in their very leaving the space for the new. Therefore, when we determine a species as present and existing, therefore as evolved and speciated, we are implicitly relying 1) on the cancellation of the previous configuration, and 2) on the cancellation of this very cancellation. In fact, the loss of those traits does not amount to any object or determination present in the new species or anywhere. As long as we see a trait (be it in a lab bacterial culture or in a fossil, or even only in a merely conjectured species), we only see it as species-determined, and therefore only as a material variation or determination of the species itself. We only see effects, and for this reason causes must be historical - a chain of “effects in themselves” that, through the action of the (metaphysically supplementary) time, produces one species after the other. The truth of a speciated species, the loss of the unspeciated, removes itself so that the new species can speciate - so that it can be determined as an actual species. Historical causes are placeholders for the cancelled truth of a species.

For this reason, the methodical anthropomorphism is hidden in this process of self-cancellation, and here the scientific objectivity of this method is ultimately protected. Only because we preliminary determine, identify, and recognize what a species amounts to^[32], we can recognize in past configurations the possibility of their cancellation (its causal function in the chain of evolution). Such possibility is species-determined (for example, a species cannot lose a gene if it does not have it in the first place) and consequently matter-determining, in the sense that it determines the possible material determinations that allow its own self-cancellation, resulting either in speciation or extinction (for example, temperature-dependent sex determination can become maladaptive in the wholly material context of global warming). This self-cancellation makes room for the new traits, which are already seen. The making-room is already qualified by what we see (for example, our contextual understanding of a trait not only shows us why it can be adaptive, but also why something else was not), and therefore what we see in the present configuration already determines what we see in the past one. In essence, in  order to have something like an evolutionary history, we can’t rely on a merely material succession of events: evolution is the result of the material interplay between configurations and time. Time here is then the principle and measure of change - what allows materiality to produce new forms by cancelling old traits and favouring new ones - the very concurrence of internal and external causes insofar as they are causes.

Evolutionary biology is essentially historical - not because evolution is one destined line, but because it elevates materiality from a merely mechanical and unqualifiable principle to the very essence of the historicity of species - instead of dissolving them into multiple mechanical determinations, it sustains them (and sustains our interpretation of them).^[33] Evolutionary biology therefore succeeds in reconciling the once assumed to be eternal and unchangeable forms and time. At the same time, as its own productive process cancels its own condition of possibility, and cancels this very cancellation in the reconstruction of an evolutionary past, it necessarily misses its very concept: evolution. Evolution, in its very evolving, as γένεσις (as production, formation) and φθορά (as dispersion into materiality) of species themselves, is lost. The origin of species is then understood as their reduction to their historical, mechanical and yet tautological, causes. The truth of the living being as such is thus forever buried in the past.

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[1] See i.e. E. Sober (1980), P. Griffiths (2002), M. Ereshefsky (2010).

[2] I remain faithful to the tradition: a dead bee is not technically a bee anymore, it has lost the essential property that holds it together, giving in to the external forces that will soon decompose it. See Aristotle, De Anima, 412a25, 412b5.

[3] According to a lockean kind of essentialism which distinguishes between nominal and real essence, but à la Putnam (see E. Casetta and A. Borghini, 2012).

[4] See Plato, Phaedrus, 265e.

[5] To be more precise, nothing would ever really be itself.

[6] These are contemporary categories, and they cannot be applied uncritically to any epoque of history. For example, without a minimal conscience of something like a neuroactivity, which can be “typical” or “divergent”, no real discrimination can there be of neurodivergents as such. This does not imply that society has always included what we call neurodivergent people. Surely it hasn’t once it had established the neural origin of many determinations humans are affected by.

[7] See E. Mayr (1982), D. Hull (1965a, 1965b). See also E. Casetta and A. Borghini, Brill’s Companion to the philosophy of biology, 2019, p. 109.

[8] M. Ereshefsky (2017), quoted in Casetta-Borghini, op. cit., pp. 101, 109.

[9] What a living being is, whether it has to be equated to the organism or the two concepts are not quite the same etc. I will leave undecided.

[10] G-L. L Buffon, Histoire naturelle (1749-1789).

[11] J-B Lamarck, Philosophie Zoologique (1809).

[12] C. Darwin, On the origin of species (1859).

[13] See for example Philosophy and politics in Gould and Lewontin’s Spandrels, available on https://endtimesphilosophy.blogspot.com/2021/02/philosophy-and-politics-in-gould-and.html.

[14] I try to keep the conceptual structure as barren as possible, in order not to engage with the numerous theoretical problems surrounding TENS, such as that of the units of selection, inheritance and evolution, or whether evolution always equals adaptation, and so on. See also  S. J. Gould and R. Lewontin (1979) for a critique  of the simplistic adaptationist view of TENS.

[15] H. Desmond and P. Huneman (2020).

[16] Ivi. See also I. Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement (1790).

[17] J-B. Lamarck, 27 Floréal an X, my translation.

[18] See for example. S. J. Gould and E. Vrba (1982).

[19] The fundamental methodical problem of historicism is addressed particularly in P. Nerhot, Libertà immanente e determinismo del tempo (2018).

[20] See for example, D. C. Queller, 1995.

[21] F. W. Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), available here: https://leudar.com/library/On%20the%20Use%20and%20Abuse%20of%20History.pdf .

[22] Ivi.

[23] This idea is still defended nowadays by various attempts at restoring the concepts of teleology, teleonomy, agency etc. See for example M. Mossio and L Bich (2014), A. S. Meincke (2017), Desmond and Huneman, op. cit. For a critique of this Kantian program, see L. Illetterati (2014), H. Ginsborg (2006).

[24] Kant, op. cit. V 360. 29 -31

[25] Ivi, V 424.29.

[26] Illetterati, op. cit.

[27] Kant, op. cit. V 400.16-20.

[28] When conservative human contexts follow this line of reasoning, the petitio principii is embarrassingly evident.

[29] It’s important to distinguish between species and populations. The logical structure of my arguments holds regardless of the kind of speciation. Take the case of allopatric speciation: population A of species X is separated into a1 and a2 of the same species; when speciation occurs in the a2, while the characters it used to share with a1 are lost in favour of of those found in the new species Y, we do not have the extinction of X, which still survives as a1. While we can still see X as existing either in A, a1 and a2, or just a1, we cannot see X in its disappearing in a2, in its being “selected out” by selection, its being “left behind” by genetic drift etc.

[30] See for example Brill’s companion to the philosophy of biology, pp. 105-106.

[31] Incidentally, notice how the concept of not-having-a-trait can be intended in two ways: 1) a species does not have a trait (for examples, a dinosaur does not have a beak), and therefore can acquire it, losing the lack of it; clearly, such a lack can be lost only in the perspective of the new acquisition: this reinforces the idea that the evolutionary history is always “retroactively” written; 2) a living being does not have a trait (for example, a bee misses its wings): such a case is possible only under the implication that “it should” have it, according to the concept of its species; a bee, infact, doesn’t miss its wings in the same way it does not have gills. It is possible to ground a dialectics of evolution and speciation on such concepts, showing how the emergence of a new trait reduces the previous configuration as a materiality finally seen as lacking a form. Naturally,this lack is possible only insofar as it cancels itself into extinction - but being at the same time identical to the previous adapted configuration, we can recognise the old one as the evolutionary past, or the ancestor, of the new one.

[32] To the extent that a species is a “predictive” concept (it allows us to predict what characters some living beings are going to have), the problem of its knowledge is connected to that of trait-decomposition: see for example E. Clarke (2010), M. E. Olson (2019).

[33] This whole argument does not imply a strong realist position towards species: exactly because species are first and foremost seen by us, historical materialism only provides objectivity to our understanding of what we see.