It seems to me that Dawkins' response was an attempt to address the "root" of many of these problem. Essentialism is necessary for people to understand by creating idealistic meaning, but in doing so you also lose knowledge by creating an abstraction.

Having said that, I'm not sure how you could "retire" this concept since we, as humans, rely on abstractions for everything (language, math, morals, etc). I feel his point is just that scientists should keep this in mind, as a check against the ego which is what leads to dogmatic thinking.

Edit: Thinking more about it I think that Dawkins' answer was a good one, but it seems like he in a way misunderstands its meaning. He uses it to showcase how it can be used to 'mislead' people into disbelieving things like evolution, but he doesn't seem to recognize that if you were to completely remove the concept of essentialism you would essentially have to accept that science can never describe everything and at some point one just has to accept things as they are without meaning. This implies, then, that science is just one 'perspective' for giving meaning to something that is essentially meaningless. This to me would also mean that science and religion are not opposing forces but simply different ways at looking at the same thing.

Thanks for the link. After reading the "Computer Science" entry I'm ready to recant and call Dawkins' essay flawless in comparison.