This essentialist view has a long history that dates back to Plato and Aristotle and was eventually overthrown by the population thinking of Charles Darwin.
'Population thinking' means many things to many people.
One worry appears when we discuss the application of "population thinking" to humans.
Since Darwin (1859), evolutionary theory has been based strongly on "population" thinking that emphasizes differences among individuals.
The other key development of the synthetic theory was the replacement of "population thinking" for "typological thinking".
In general, students did not appear to understand the mechanism of image generation in MRI, with 23% of the study population thinking that MRI increased lifetime risk of cancer compared with 31.8% of controls (p < 0.001) (Fig. 1).
Many students also struggle with the idea of evolution as changes in the frequency of an allele or trait within a population, thinking instead that populations change their traits gradually as a whole.
Examples include Harré's 2009 discussion of the role tropes play (and don't play) in chemistry and Nanay's 2010 attempt to use tropes to improve on Ernst Mayr's "population thinking" in biology.
This was reflected in the attitudes of Geologists- science teachers of our research: although they did not possess a population thinking way of thinking that characterizes the advanced students of evolution, nonetheless, they had the readiness to proceed easily into the former stage of evolution understanding, i.e. the move from the typological way of thinking, into an early evolutionary thinking.
When we are coming to the later stage of conceptual development in students' mental constructs with regard to the understanding of evolution, this stage constitutes the true evolutionary thinking, that is characterized by what was refer to before, as population thinking.
Little surprise, then, that it has been argued that evolutionary biology as a whole has undergone a shift to "tree thinking" (O'Hara 1988), akin to the earlier movement toward "population thinking" that helped to shape the Neo-Darwinian synthesis around the mid-twentieth century (Mayr and Provine 1980).
