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On the origin of species
When Darwin presented his “On the origin of Species”, he he put ants in the minds of all people, both religious and secular. The problem for religious people is obvious, but the problem for secular people is not his notion of evolution itself, but rather his simplified description of it as “an origin of species”.
The reason is that the notion of “species” is a more fundamental problem than the notion of “evolution” is. The problem is that “species” conceptually is a kind of kinds, which is inconsistent (as Bertrand Russell later demonstrated with “Russell’s paradox), meaning that evolution can’t be described as an “origin of species” per definition, since no such description is consistent. This simplified description of evolution is thus not scientific.
A worse problem with this (thus inconsistent) simplified description is that it provides a foundation for racism (and thereby also for race biology). This problem puts secular people (like me) in a fox trap. We have to choose between acknowledging Darwin’s model and thereby also acknowledging inconsistency and racism, or deny Darwin’s model and thereby join religious people. Confronted with this choice, I thus choose to acknowledge Darwin’s model of how evolution works, but not how how he describes it.
I thus accept that all living beings have originated by evolution, but claim that “the origin of species” is a matter of psychology rather than of history, that is, that “species” have originated in our minds rather than in reality.
Another contribution to understanding of conceptualization http://menvall.wordpress.com/
Source: https://menvall.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/on-the-origin-of-species/
