Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

324 HOW THE MIND WORKSneed to know what the essence is, just that there is one. Some peopleprobably think that lionhood is in the blood; others might mumble somethingabout DNA; still others would have no idea but would sense thatlions all have it, whatever it is, and pass it to their offspring. Even whenan essence is known, it is not a definition. Physicists tell us that gold ismatter with atomic number 79, as good an essence as we can hope for.But if they had miscalculated and it turned out that gold was 78 andplatinum 79, we would not think that the word gold now refers to platinumor experience much of a change in the way we think about gold.Compare these intuitions with our feelings about artifacts like coffeepots.Coffeepots are pots for making coffee. The possibility that allcoffeepots have an essence, that scientists might someday discover it, orthat we might have been wrong about coffeepots all along and that theyare really pots for making tea are worthy of Monty Python's Flying Circus.If the driving intuition behind folk physics is the continuous solidobject, and the driving intuition behind animacy is an internal andrenewable source of oomph, then the driving intuition behind naturalkinds is a hidden essence. Folk biology is said to be essentialistic. Theessence has something in common with the oomph that powers animals'motions, but it also is sensed to give the animal its form, to drive itsgrowth, and to orchestrate its vegetative processes like breathing anddigestion. Of course, today we know that this elan vital is really just atiny data tape and chemical factory inside every cell.Intuitions about essences can be found long ago and far away. Evenbefore Darwin, the Linnaean classification system used by professionalbiologists was guided by a sense of proper categories based not on similaritybut on underlying constitution. Peacocks and peahens were classifiedas the same animal, as were a caterpillar and the butterfly it turnedinto. Some similar animals—monarch and viceroy butterflies, mice andshrews—were put into different groups because of subtle differences intheir internal structure or embryonic forms. The classification was hierarchical:every living thing belonged to one species, every speciesbelonged to one genus, and so on up through families, classes, orders,and phyla to the plant and animal kingdoms, all in one tree of life. Again,compare this system with the classification of artifacts—say, the tapes ina video store. They can be arranged by genre, such as dramas and musicals,by period, such as new releases and classics, by alphabetical order,by country of origin, or by various cross-classifications such as foreign