Quick and dirty summary from Ershevsky:

“Essentialism sorts entities according to

their essential natures. Cluster analysis divides entities into groups
whose members share a cluster of similar traits, though none of those
traits are essential.The historical approach classifies entities according
to their causal relations rather than their intrinsic qualitative features.”

Functional scientific kinds—P.D. Magnus—

● What kind of functions are useful to Biologists that would produce scientific kinds?
○ Historical kinds (we know the pretty exact lineages of the Daphnia) allow the
seemingly pretty objective proclaiming of kinds based on history. This could
relate to HPCs, in that if members of a population share the same history, then
outside (and internal) forces governing their properties may maintain their
identities in the manner of an HPC.
○ Think about the conversing Intraspecific diversity paper—what are the reasons
for conserving intraspecific diversity?
■ For general species conservation, methods like 16s ribosomal
sequencing may be chosen quite exclusively for their scientific practicality
(or at least ease,) and the remaining

Biological Essentialism—Micheal Devitt—“Defending Intrinsic Biological Essentialism”:

● Michael Devitt emphasizes that essentialism in biology should not be limited to just
species, and wants to include subspecies and all taxa.
○ Sarah’s data is important in the context of showing that mutation rate is highly
variable, even within species and even within subspecies—in other words,
showing that the rate of mutation is not an essential property of species.
—Matt Ershevsky—The Poverty of the Linnean Hierarchy—on essentialism
● “According to essentialism, each entity has an essential feature that makes it the type of
entity that it is. That feature is an entity’s real essence. The real essence of an entity
occurs in all and only entities of that type, and it helps us understand why entities of that
type do the sorts of things they do. For the essentialist, real essences capture the
fundamental structure of the world; or to use Plato’s phrase, they “carve nature at its
joints.”

Property Clusters
● With the table of life history traits, we could determine which properties appear to form
clusters, or fail to form clusters.

Homeostatic property clusters—P.D. Magnus’ defintion, for now

● “Roughly, an homeostatic property cluster (HPC) is a stable collection of properties
which tend to occur together, unified by the causal tendency for them to occur together”
(Magnus, 148)
 ○ Magnus also argues that electrons are a kind, but not a homeostatic property
cluster since “electrons, as fundamental particles, have the basic properties they
do without any underlying causal process to hold them together.” (Magnus, 148)
■ This seems to me to conflate whether or not properties of the thing itself
are what forms a homeostatic property cluster, or whether it is some kind
of outside universe force that causes property clusters to be homeostatic
○ Ershevsky's response to HPCs and species—argues that HPCs don’t really fit
well with the species-as-individuals view, since species have beginnings,
middles, and ends.
■ This is a quite strange situation in which to study, well, all such kinds.

Species individualism
● Species are individuals
○ You really must refresh yourself on what this actually means…

Species concepts:
● BSC