Folkbiology

Rating:
Summary: Biology of the Masses
Review: Human Nature Review, Volume 2, 2002, 146
While there has been much talk in the cognitive science literature of "folk psychology" and "folk physics," there has been relatively little discussion of the everyday understanding that most people use to classify and reason about living things. This is surprising, since as bio-logical creatures we spend probably the most important and meaningful segments of our life-cycle interacting with other biological crea-tures-our spouses, children, pets, food, and the like. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran fill this gap in the literature in an interesting way with Folkbiology, a collection of essays featuring such luminaries as Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame), Frank Keil and David Hull. These three authors represent, respectively, the fields of anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy of biology. This gives some indication of the interdisciplinary flavor and range of this collection of original articles. The book's introductory and capstone essays are excellent. Medin and Atran concisely discuss the several issues covered in the book in a helpful manner, and David Hull's concluding essay ("Interdisciplinary Disso-nance") is lively and provocative. All in all, the essays are linked in interesting ways and are uniformly good, with several of them being ex-cellent contributions to the literature. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran have done great service to the ethnobiological com-munity by collecting together these original pieces. Moreover, this work has the potential to more broadly impact anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy of biology, whether it be by expanding anthropological horizons via a consideration of cross cultural folkbiological taxonomies, providing another example to in-form cognitive scientists' deliberations about cognitive development and the presence of cognitive universals, or by helping philosophers of science settle the ongoing dispute about the exact nature of the term "species." I commend this book to you if you are interested in any of these issues.