Biological Essentialism

Sociology (Humanities), mid-90s

Science. The “Nature” bit in Nature vs Nurture or “Hardware” bit in Hardware vs Software. The arch-enemy global supervillain trying to destroy the Brave Movement to define everything you’ve ever heard of as something society, (whomever that is) just made up with words. What Joseph Mengele and the Nazis did.

Darwin’s theses introduced the idea of populations and polymorphism, which updated the classical Greek theories of Forms. Since the 1930s, essentialism has been seen as outdated. Children can grasp it, professors can’t. Sociology’s sharpest slur in the fight to prove it’s all really nurture. The term emerged from nowhere, back from the grave, in the 90s.

• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=Biological+Essentialism
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Biological+Essentialism
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms