Ernst Mayr, distinguished elder statesman of twentieth-century evolution, has blamed the delusion of discontinuity—under its philosophical name of Essentialism—as the main reason why evolutionary understanding came so late in human history. Plato, whose philosophy can be seen as the inspiration for Essentialism, believed that actual things are imperfect versions of an ideal archetype of their kind. Hanging somewhere in ideal space is an essential, perfect rabbit, which bears the same relation to a real rabbit as a mathematician’s perfect circle bears to a circle drawn in the dust. To this day
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