From Kinds to Characters: Rethinking the Concept of Sex in Evolutionary Biology
Sex is one of the most contested concepts within and beyond biology. I argue that many disagreements over its definition arise from conceiving sex as a kind of individual rather than as a character. After examining the limitations of treating sex as an individual property that defines sexual kinds, I turn to how sexual characters are individuated in evolutionary biology, showing how different criteria of individuation yield distinct groupings of traits and divergent interpretations of sex evolution. First, I analyze the selectionist view, which understands sex as an adaptive reproductive strategy and sexual characters as a nonadaptive domain shaped by sexual selection. Second, I contrast the selectionist criteria for individuating sexual characters with the historical and developmental criteria used in evolutionary developmental biology. Using pregnancy and the female orgasm as examples of female sexual characters, I illustrate the respective strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. I argue that shifting the focus from kinds to characters overcomes the limitations of explanatory inferences from individual traits to binary character complexes. Viewing sex as an attribute of developmentally individuated characters explains why sexual traits are only loosely correlated, enables explanatory generalizations across species, accommodates continuous variation, and provides a coherent framework for intersex and hermaphroditic individuals. I conclude by reflecting on how this conceptual shift informs debates in feminist metaphysics regarding the ontological status of human sex.
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Laura Nuño de la Rosa CSIC
