E. O. Wilson popularized the term biophilia
However, one of the strongest arguments for the biophilia hypothesis is not that you find naturalists wherever you go. Ask a college freshman to name 10 species, let alone 10 species of bird, and you find most struggling after five or six (a disturbing number forget Homo sapiens). The best evidence is that among these very same students, one can recognize every release of the Ford Mustang, one collects lady head vases, and another can give a spontaneous lecture on the subtle variations in, and performance of, the WW II fighter, the P-51 Mustang. Given the incredible accumulation of facts such obsessions demand, and the relative unimportance of Ford Mustangs to our ancestors on the plains of Africa, the most reasonable hypothesis is that this whole “collecting” thing is best understood as displaced biophilia. IOW, if you grew up in suburban North America, you likely saw more species of cars than birds, and were predisposed to obsess about the former. (OK, cars were probably more linked to your fitness, as they were your predators when you were young, and offered reproductive opportunities when you were a bit older, but you get my general point).
I have never seen a better illustration of displaced biophilia than this pseudobiological poster describing the relative sizes of every Starship from the annals of science fiction, from the Enterprise (Constitution Class), to the Borg collective’s assimilation cube, to the Galactic Empire’s (Executer Class). It is gorgeous, as all good depictions of scaling relationships can be. That is just happens to thrill the sci-fi geek, is not, as they say, a bug, but a feature.
If you want to catch someone’s attention, exploit their biophilia. Place a bunch of subtly different objects in front of them, scaled appropriately, and let them play “one of these things is not like the other“.
Survive and Thrive in Grad School 
“Displaced biophilia” seems a stangely biophiliac-centric interepretation of the ability to catagorise and make distinctions about things that matter to us.
Steven Mithven’s “A Prehistory of Mind” has a lot of interesting things to say about how our current cognitive capacities may have developed from much more specialised and specific ones. And most of that development would have happened pretty recently in human history, long after we would already have the skills to deal with a complex biological environment, much as other primates do.
A lot of cognitive scientists think our specificlally human capacities are mostly due to the coming together of language, technical intelligence (i.e. about tools), and social intelligence.
And while there are plenty of humans that have little interest in the natural world, pretty much all of us are extremely absorbed in a world of tools, social relations, and culture.
Sounds like an interesting book. Bear in mind tho, that Cognitive and Evolutionary hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. The existing advantages to making fine distinctions among objects that “vary on a theme” could be further honed by social interactions. If, for argument’s sake, Biophilia came first, how would would distinguish the contribution of both? If Mithven’s hypotheses tell us how, I’m all ears.