Typological thinking: Then and now

Abstract

A popular narrative about the history of modern biology has it that Ernst Mayr introduced the distinction between “typological thinking” and “population thinking” to mark a contrast between a metaphysically problematic and a promising foundation for (evolutionary) biology, respectively. This narrative sometimes continues with the observation that, since the late‐20th century, typological concepts have been making a comeback in biology, primarily in the context of evolutionary developmental biology. It is hard to square this narrative with the historical and philosophical literature on the typology/population distinction from the last decade or so. The conclusion that emerges from this literature is that the very distinction between typological thinking and population thinking is a piece of mere rhetoric that was concocted and rehearsed for purely strategic, programmatic reasons. If this is right, it becomes hard to make sense of recent criticisms (and sometimes: espousals) of the purportedly typological underpinnings of certain contemporary research programs. In this article, I offer a way out of this apparent conflict. I show that we can make historical and philosophical sense of the continued accusations of typological thinking by looking beyond Mayr, to his contemporary and colleague George Gaylord Simpson. I show that before Mayr discussed the typology/population distinction as an issue in scientific metaphysics, Simpson introduced it to mark several contrasts in methodology and scientific practice. I argue that Simpson's insightful discussion offers useful resources for classifying and assessing contemporary attributions of typological thinking.

Design Space Constraints and the Cultural Taxonomy of European Final Palaeolithic Large Tanged Points: A Comparison of Typological, Landmark-Based and Whole-Outline Geometric Morphometric Approaches

“…With reference to now classic debates on essentialism and typological thinking on the one hand and materialism and population thinking on the other (Hull, 1965;Mayr, 1959;Sober, 1980), the pioneers of evolutionary archaeology have long argued against classification approaches that assume pre-existing mental templates or ideal forms (see, for instance, O 'Brien & Lyman, 2002). More contemporary writing in the philosophy of biology is critically revisiting and correcting the original debate (Witteveen, 2015(Witteveen, , 2018, however, and archaeological rhetoric should likely follow on towards a more nuanced epistemological understanding of variation and its generative processes (Tostevin, 2019).…”

Process-Sensitive Naming: Trait Descriptors and the Shifting Semantics of Plant (Data) Science

“…This in turns means opening the Pandora's box of what constitutes biologically meaningful difference among organisms, thereby challenging what Staffan Müller-Wille has identified as a key driver for Linnaean taxonomy: that is the creation of "horizontal equivalence" among species, which enables to create and count associations and, to some extent, "eliminate difference" between token organisms (Müller-Wille 2017). This focus on similarity, with its related emphasis on the typicality of species rather than traits (see also Witteveen 2015Witteveen , 2018, has been immensely successful in creating a level playing field to exchange information about groups of organisms. Its usefulness is obvious when the goal of biological analysis is to understand the evolutionary history of organisms.…”

Comparative Thinking in Biology

“…Of course, this is far too neat a history to be plausible. Joeri Witteveen (2016Witteveen ( , 2018 Recently, Marc Ereshefsky has introduced which he calls homology thinking (Ereshefsky 2012(Ereshefsky , 2007 ). Homology thinking is focused, unsurprisingly, on homologies: "Population thinking cites the structure of a population to explain the properties of a population.…”