Principios de Taxonomia

2.8 The Species as an Intuitive Concept and a Cognitive Preset in the Human Mindj25
the taxonomist, but it is highly dangerous because our spontaneous sensations are
cognitively programmed. They are thus able to deceive us in the same way as the idea
of a flat Earth or sunrise.
The physicist knows better than the biologist with respect to space and time that we
are easily misled by the appearance that nature presents directly to our senses and
that reality is often different from what we perceive. The intuitive knowledge that two
events that humans on Earth observe at the same time in the universe also happen at
the same time for an observer who stands at a different point in the universe is a
useful subjective form of organization by our mind. Since Einstein, however, we have
known that this is not actually the case. The concept of contemporaneity is not an
objective reality that exists independently from space. We should be vigilant that the
classification of species does not turn out to be a similar situation in which we are
fooled by spontaneous perception. In any case, caution is advised with regard to
trusting intuition.
The cognitive scientist Scott Atran (1999) explored the question of the extent to
which the feeling that certain organisms belong to groups and our certainty that
there is a natural relatedness underlying this have a predetermined genetic basis.
Atran arrived at the conclusion that we are all born typologists, whether we want to
be or not.
In years of exploration, Atran compared native Mayans in Guatemala with urban
students of the US Midwest. The first group did not have formal education but
constantly encountered animals and plants in nature, whereas the second group had
good formal education but almost no contact with nature. Humans of both cultures
classify animals as well as plants into groups. For example, several thrush species and
oak species are combined into natural groups because of their resemblance without
these categories ever having been learned. It is automatically assumed that there is a
sameness that holds the organisms together in a natural unit. In contrast,
inanimate objects, such as stones, are not perceived in a way indicating that natural
cohesive groups are present. Remarkably, the Itzaj Maya from the middle-American
rain forest are no different in this respect from city residents in Michigan.
Classification of organisms into taxa does not seem only to be a product of
education but, rather, seems to be inherent to human beings. Across a number of
cultures and educational systems, there seems to exist a mental representation of the
biological world in our mind independent from any actual experience that is
comparable to our cognitive preset with respect to the concept of space and time.
No human who has an awareness of the concept of time ever had to learn what time is.
Ideally, selection would have led to humans being better able to deal with the
organisms that they encounter in their environment. We can almost instantaneously
identify organisms as enemies to be dealt with (without having to be individually
subjected to the harmful experience), or identify them quickly as harmless partners
with which we can live, or as exploitable food sources (without having to check in
every case whether a fruit tastes bitter or is poisonous). It is essential for the survival
of a newly hatched chicken, which is easy prey for a raptor, that it can distinguish an
Accipiter raptor (Goshawk or Sparrow Hawk) from a harmless dove, without the
chicken ever having had an opportunity to learn this. In this process, the type of dove