Universal Darwinism and process essentialism

Abstract

Daniel Dennett has claimed that ‘nothing complicated enough to be really interesting could have an essence’. He and other universal Darwinists hold that Darwin’s theory undermined traditional essentialism in biology. This paper shows, first, that Dennett and other universal Darwinists are themselves committed to an essentialist view about historical processes, and second, that this process essentialism is optional. One can be a universal Darwinist without being a process essentialist.