The creation of the essentialism story
Subtitle: an exercise in metahistory
By: Mary P. Winsor
Publisher: Olschki
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Firenze
Language: eng
Number of pages: 174
Subjects: Biology; Classification; History
Notes: Caption title.

Offprint from: History and philosophy of the life sciences, v. 28, 2006.

"The essentialism story is a version of the history of biological classification that was fabricated between 1953 and 1968 by Ernst Mayr, who combined contributions from Arthur Cain and David Hull with his own grudge against Plato. It portrays pre-Darwinian taxonomists as caught in the grip of an ancient philosophy called essentialism, from which they were not released until Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species."--Abstract, p. 149.