ABSTRACT
What follows is a discussion of four sets of experimental results that deal with various aspects of biological understanding among American and Maya children and adults. The first set of experiments shows that Yukatek Maya children do not have an anthropocentric understanding of the biological world; that is, children do not universally reason about nonhuman living kinds by analogy to human kinds. The fact that urban (but not rural) American children do show an anthropocentric bias appears to owe more to a difference in cultural exposure to nonhuman biological kinds than to a basic causal understanding of folk biology per se. The second set of experiments shows that by the age of 4 to 5 years (the earliest age tested in this regard), rural Maya children as well as urban Brazilian (and American) children employ a concept of innate species potential, or underlying essence, as an inferential framework for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty. Together, the first two sets of experiments indicate that folk psychology cannot be the initial source of folk biology. They also suggest that to understand modern biological science, people must unlearn universal dispositions to view species essentialistically and to see humans as fundamentally different than other animals.
