When and where does the child’s understanding of biology come from? The Harvard psychologist Susan Carey argues that children take a relatively long time to understand biology. They may be able to sort birds and planes and cats and dogs, but Carey thinks that such categorizing is only simple pattern detection that doesn’t require a deep understanding of biology. To get to grips with biology you have to appreciate life as a state of being, as well as the invisible processes associated with it. In Carey’s reckoning, it’s not until age six or seven that children begin to understand what it is to be alive.12
Also, babies may spot the difference between living and non-living things, but they could just be making judgements based on how humanlike something is. In other words, they may be thinking nothing more than that the closer something in the natural world is to looking or behaving like a human, the more likely it is to have the same biological properties as humans. It’s anthropomorphism at work again, not reasoning about other life forms as separate categories. We can get an idea of children’s level of biological knowledge if we show them pictures of plants, insects, animals, and objects and ask them questions such as: Does it eat? Does it breathe? Does it sleep? Does it have babies? The closer things are to looking or behaving like humans, the more biological properties children give them. For example, in one study pre-schoolers thought that dogs and even mechanical monkeys were more likely to eat, breathe, sleep, and have babies in comparison to bees and buttercups because they resembled humans and seemed more purposeful than insects and plants.13
As far as it goes, this is not a bad strategy. It’s the pre-schoolers’ equivalent to the ‘if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck’ approach to figuring out the living world. However, more recent research suggests that preschoolers do have something akin to a biological awareness that goes beyond simple outward appearances. Children think that there must be something inside animals that makes them both unique and alive. Before they reach school, children start to think like most adults in terms of essences and life forces. They are intuitive essentialists and vitalists.
THE ESSENCE OF LIFE
What is an essence? Consider the real essence of physical chemical compounds. Both flowers and cats can produce such a physical essence. In perfumery, essences are the concentrated reduced quantity of a fragrant substance after all the impurities have been removed. Chanel No. 5 is one of the world’s most successful perfumes and is very expensive because of the cost of harvesting one of its chief ingredients, jasmine blossoms. These are grown in the Provence region of France and survive for only the briefest time before losing their fragrance.
Another reason Chanel No. 5 is expensive, apart from jasmine essence, is that until recently it also contained musk secretions from the anal glands of the endangered civet cat, the same species in Asia that excretes coffee beans to produce the Kopi Luwak gourmet coffee mentioned earlier. (The civet cat is not actually a cat but a raccoonlike creature.) Musk is a sex chemical that a number of mammals use to attract partners and mark their territory. The pungent smell takes a long time to decay, and so perfumers use musk to prolong the scent of more fragile fragrances. When it became widely known that Chanel used civet cat musk in its perfumes, Chanel replaced this ingredient with a synthetic musk compound. It is not clear whether this decision was due to pressure from the animal rights groups concerned about the cruelty inflicted during the musk extraction process or, more likely, to consumers’ distaste at discovering that they had been smearing secretions from an animal’s bum around their delicate wrists and necks.
In philosophy, essences are less smelly. In fact, you can’t detect them at all because they exist beyond man’s ability to perceive. Greek philosophers thought essences were some inner, invisible substance that made things what they truly were, like another dimension to reality. For example, Plato, probably the most prominent exponent of essentialism in his theory of ideal forms, argued that everything has an inner reality that we cannot necessarily perceive. Aware that appearances can be deceptive, he proposed that the world we experience is only a shadow of true reality. He likened human experience to sitting in a cave and watching reflections of reality from outside projected as shadows on the cave wall. It’s a bit like our Matrix comparison again. We glimpse only a fraction of the reality that truly exists. Plato thought that humans could never get at the true essence or form of things because of the limits of our minds.
Plato’s analogy is true in some sense – well, actually, all senses when it comes down to it. Our brains can process only the information we receive from the outside world through our senses. But our senses are limited. We know there is sound we cannot hear, light we cannot see, smell we cannot detect, and so on.14 This means that there are things in the world that we cannot directly perceive. There are microbes, viruses, particles, atoms, and all manner of teeny-weeny things that we know must exist but that are invisible to us. We are only ever glimpsing a portion of reality. Likewise, early essentialists thought that essences reside beyond our sensory range. Plato thought each essence is the core internal property that gives a thing its unique identity.
An essence is not to be confused with any unique property. For example, humans are the only mammals that have opposable thumbs. Thumbs may be unique to humans, but they are not essential. You would still be human if you were born without thumbs. Rather human essence is some invisible property that distinguishes us from non-humans. Like the pod-people in the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alien replicants might be identical to us in every physical way, but they would lack the essential quality that makes us human.15
As comforting a notion as human essence might be – that even though our bodies wither and decay there is some enduring stuff inside us – this philosophical position is a logical nonstarter. That’s because there is more than one way to define any object, including a human. The same individual human can simultaneously be a male, an adolescent, a prince, a neurotic, an artist, an athlete, an atheist, and so on. An object can be a stone, a paperweight, an ashtray, a weapon, a counterweight, or even a sculpture. And if there is more than one way to define an individual, you can’t have a unique essence of that individual. Aristotle was Plato’s student, but he realized that his teacher had been mistaken as far as essences were concerned. So the idea that there is only one true individual essence is nonsense.
When art critics and gallery owners talk about the essence of a piece of art, they are talking essential nonsense. However, just because something is nonsense doesn’t stop people believing in it. People can still hold a psychological essentialism.16 It helps us to think about uniqueness as a tangible property. This is my cup. This is my Picasso. This is my body. Psychological essentialism is the belief that some individual things, such as other people or works of art, are defined by a unique essence; as we will see in the coming chapters, such a belief would explain many of our attitudes when we think essences have been violated, manipulated, duplicated, exchanged, or generally mucked about with. Humans like to think that special things are unique by virtue of something deep and irreplaceable. When we chop nature up into all its different groups of living things, we are assuming that these are groups of things that are essentially different.