ESS
Essence Categorization
Class: I - Natural Selection
EPA Total Score: 43 /100
Gil-White, F. J. (2001). Are ethnic groups biological “species” to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories. Current Anthropology, 42(4), 515-553.
Abstract: If ethnic actors represent ethnic groups as essentialized natural groups despite the fact that ethnic essences do not exist, we must understand why. This article presents a hypothesis and evidence that humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social categories) as if they were species because their surface similarities to species make them inputs to the "living kinds" mental module that initially evolved to process specieslevel categories. The main similarities responsible are (1) category-based endogamy and (2) descent-based membership. Evolution encouraged this because processing ethnic groups as species, at least in the ancestral environment, solved adaptive problems having to do with interactional discriminations and behavioral prediction. Coethnics (like conspecifics) share many strongly intercorrelated properties that are not obvious on first inspection. Since interaction with outgroup members is costly because of coordination failure due to different norms between ethnic groups, thinking of ethnic groups as species adaptively promotes interactional discriminations towards the ingroup (including endogamy). It also promotes inductive generalizations, which allow acquisition of reliable knowledge for behavioral prediction without too much costly interaction with outgroup members. The relevant cognitivescience literature is reviewed, and cognitive field-experiment and ethnographic evidence from Mongolia is advanced to support the hypothesis.
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Supporting Evidence
10/100
Submitted by DJGlass
10/100
Submitted by DJGlass
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10/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any supporting Genetic evidence for this EPA.
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Supporting Evidence is evidence that suggests that this trait is an Evolved Psychological Adaptation (EPA) - i.e., that it has been shaped by natural selection to solve a particular adaptive problem.
Challenging Evidence
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Medical evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Physiological evidence for this EPA.
0/100
Submitted by DJGlass
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Genetic evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Phylogenetic evidence for this EPA.
No one has (yet) rated this source as containing any challenging Hunter-Gatherer evidence for this EPA.
Challenging Evidence is evidence that suggests that this trait is not an EPA - e.g., that it is a product of cultural learning or genetic drift, or maybe it does not exist at all. However over each line of evidence for a description.