Folk biology or folkbiology is the cognitive study of how people classify
and reason about the organic world. Humans everywhere classify animal

Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...

s and plants into obvious species

Species

In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...

-like groups. The relationship between a folk taxonomy

Folk taxonomy

A folk taxonomy is a vernacular naming system, and can be contrasted with scientific taxonomy. Folk biological classification is the way peoples describe and organize their natural surroundings/the world around them, typically making generous use of form taxa like "shrubs", "bugs", "ducks",...

 and a scientific classification can assist in understanding how evolutionary theory deals with the apparent constancy of “common species” and the organic processes centering on them. From the vantage of evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

, such natural systems are arguably routine “habits of mind,” a sort of heuristic

Heuristic

Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...

 used to make sense of the natural world.

External links

• Scott Atran
  Scott Atran
  Scott Atran is an American and French anthropologist.-Education and early career:Atran was born in New York City in 1952 and he received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. While a student at Columbia, he became assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of...
  
   (1999) Folkbiology (PDF), in Robert Wilson and Frank Keil , Ed. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, pages 316-317. MIT Press.