In the case of race, you have the Jensens and Jeffries both arguing that racial natural kinds resulting from adaptation to different environments predisposes 'types' to quite predictable behavioral polymorphism.
This kind of essentialism is also to be found both in sociobiologists and radical feminists--perhaps Mary Daly?
As John Dupre puts the thesis: "that the simple fact of gamete size dimorphism strongly disposes species to certain subsequent evolutionary developments, specifically, to quite predictable behavioral dimorphism. At its most general, the theory asserts thatose organisms with smaller gametes (that is males) will tend to develop behavioral strategies that maximize the dispersion of their gametes, while the females will tend to develop strategies that increase the chances of successful maturation of those offspring that they are able to assist...It has not escaped notice that this theory recreates and naturalizes the traditional human stereotype"
Dupre's critique of sociobiological and essentialist feminism is rather well put. To quote him at length:
Although the universality or near universality of male domination is a phenomenon well worth theoretical study, there is no reason for taking it as contradicting the basic variability in human sexually differentiated behavior that I have been asserting....male domination is a phenomenon on a higher level of abstraction than is the characterisation of particular forms of behavior in particular socieites. There is no reason to suppose that the exercise of male domination is itself something that has always been implemented by the very same kinds of behavior....even if male supremacy is genuinely universal, the enormous variability in the form it takes indicates extensive interactions with more specific forces that, in turn, show there are no grounds for assuming that even the abstractly characterised consequence is in any way inevitable...we should consider the question whether man and woman (in their biological sense) are potentially useful categories. As *purely* biological kinds, they are largely unexceptionable, if of very limited significance; it may be allowed as a modest nomic generalisation, for example, that humans born with penises tend to grow facial hair later in their lives. But there is a powerful tendency...to extend the relevance of explanatory categories byeond their empirically warranted limits, a tendency that derives philosophical nourishment from the idea that when one has distinguished a kind one has discovered an essence. If in fact the empirical significance of the kinds man and woman does not go beyond some systematic, if quite variable, physiological differences and the observation tha tmen have achieved a dominant position in almost all or most societies, the kinds distinguished seem of modest significance. Nothing in those empirical facts provides motivation for thinking that those categories should be accorded fundamental importance in explaining the highly diverse forms of behavior found in very different social systems, whether such explanatory efforts are motivated by androcentric apologetics or by misplaced feminist enthusiasm."
Perhaps Daly is a case of the latter?
>From John Durpre's chapter on essences in The Disorder of Things:
Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Harvard 1993
yours, rakesh