Biological theories of sexual orientation, typically presented in human sexuality classes, are considered by many social psychologists to cause reductions in students’ sexual prejudice. Yet when biological theories were not presented to 36 psychology students in a ten-week seminar on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) psychology, both sexual prejudice and two forms of essentialist th...

Abstract A minimal essentialism (“intrinsic biological essentialism”) about natural kinds is required to explain the projectability of human science terms. Human classifications that yield robust and ampliative projectable inferences refer kinds. I articulate this argument with reference an intrinsic essentialist account homeostatic property cluster This implies sciences (e.g., medicine, psychi...

Contingencies of selection, be they phylogenetic or ontogenetic, merely set boundaries on units; they do not provide blueprints. Thus, variability is fundamental to all products of selection. Skinner, by characterizing the units of analysis in behavior as generic in nature, established his science squarely within the selectionist paradigm, thereby avoiding the tendency, common throughout psycho...

In the 1960s, U.S. physical anthropology underwent a period of introspection that marked a change from the old physical anthropology that was largely race based to the new physical anthropology, espoused by Washburn and others for over a decade, which incorporated the evolutionary biology of the modern synthesis. What actually changed? What elements of the race concept have been rejected, and w...

In the target article (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011), we provided a social–cognitive framework which identified genetic essentialist biases and their implications. In their commentaries, Haslam (2011) and Turkheimer (2011) indicated their general agreement with this framework but highlighted some important points for consideration. Haslam suggested that neuroessentialism is a comparable kind of ess...

Three basic positions regarding the nature of fundamental properties are: dispositional monism, categorical monism and the mixed view. Dispositional monism apparently involves a regress or circularity, while an unpalatable consequence of categorical monism and the mixed view is that they are committed to quidditism. I discuss Alexander Bird's defence of dispositional monism based on the structu...