indicate that they are all more or less similar.... However,
children who are so sure that all crocodiles have similar insides
are much less certain about the innards of telephones or televi-
sion sets. That these have some common features is not the
point. Children can recognize a telephone when they see one,
and they know what a TV set is for. It is simply not that obvi-
ous to them that machines are what they are because of what is
insidethem. The beautiful thing about this principle is that it is
entirely abstract. That is, children expect the innards of all
crocodiles to be essentially similar, but they generally have no
[108] idea of what actually is inside a crocodile, or any other animals
for that matter. Psychologist Frank Keil observed that young
children have the vaguest notion of what is inside an animal
body yet are quite sure that whatever is inside one mouse must
be inside other mice as well.^10
There is in fact a deeper and more subtle aspect to these
banal inferences. Living species (genera, for biologists: dog,
cat, giraffe, etc.) are generally represented in essentialist terms
by both children and adults. That is, we assume that cows
have some internal property (or set of properties) that is
characteristic of the species as a whole and cannot be
removed. Psychologists Frank Keil, Henry Wellmann and
Susan Gelman have extensively documented this kind of rep-
resentation in young children, but it occurs in adults too.
Suppose you take a cow, surgically remove the excess body
mass and re-model it to look like a horse, add a mane and a
nice tail, and perform other operations so it eats, moves and
generally behaves like a horse. Is it a horse? For most people,
including most children, it is not. It is a disguised cow, a
horsy cow to be sure, perhaps a cross-cultural cow, but in
essence still a cow. There is something about being a cow
that is internal and permanent. You can have this assumption
without having any representation of what the "essence" is.
That is, most people represent that cows have some essential
"cowness" about them, even if they cannot describe cowness.
All they know is that cowness, whatever it is, cannot be
removed and creates external features. Cowness explains why
a cow grows horns and hooves.^11
That animals have species-wide essences corresponds to
another special characteristic of animal concepts, namely that
RELIGION EXPLAINED