Are there Psychological Species?

Joshua Fost
2014 Review of Philosophy and Psychology  
A common reaction to functional diversity is to group entities into clusters that are functionally similar. I argue here that people are diverse with respect to reasoning-related processes, and that these processes satisfy the basic requirements for evolving entities: they are heritable, mutable, and subject to selective pressures. I propose a metric to quantify functional difference and show how this can be used to place psychological processes into a structure akin to a phylogenetic or
more » ... onary tree. Three species concepts are repurposed from biology and used to understand relationships in that tree.
doi:10.1007/s13164-014-0227-y fatcat:q3nk5ozbrjdz7mliymuzciprq4