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Animals and Ecological Science Animals and Ecological Science Oxford Handbooks Online Animals and Ecological Science Anita Guerrini The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (Forthcoming) Edited by Linda Kalof Subject: Political Science, Political Theory, Comparative Politics Online Publication Date: Feb DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199927142.013.25 2015 Abstract and Keywords Ecological science, which studies the relationships between organisms and their environments, developed from natural history. Aristotle’s teleological chain of being and detailed description modeled natural history until the eighteenth century. Linnaeus and Buffon replaced Aristotelian categories with new criteria for classification, leading the way to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Darwinian evolution depended on environmental factors and led to the birth of ecological science by the end of the nineteenth century. The ecosystem concept emphasizes populations and systems rather than individuals. Case studies, of wolves and fish show the range of modern ecological science. Anthropogenic changes to the environment have led to extinction and endangered species. Attempts to meliorate human influence include rewilding and synthetic biology. Keywords: ecological science, chain of being, ecosystem, endangered species, evolution, extinction, natural history, rewilding, synthetic biology, taxonomy Introduction The chapter examines animals as objects of scientific study in the ecological sciences under three broad headings. Before there was ecological science, there was natural history, while today some believe that the future of ecological science is in what has been called de-extinction or synthetic biology. Between these two extremes, I look at some current practices in ecological science, with case studies of wolves and fish. The following section of the volume looks at animals in ecosystems. From Natural History to Ecology Although Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was not the first to regard animals as subjects of inquiry rather than as commodities, he was the first Western philosopher to do this systematically. His works on animals, particularly History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals, established a science of natural history that endured until Darwin and in some ways persists today. Historia (Greek ἱστορία) originally meant simply an “inquiry” or an “investigation,” or an account of such an inquiry. It did not imply the passage of time. Aristotle’s History of Animals offered detailed descriptions of all animals known to him. Unlike his mentor Plato, Aristotle was no armchair philosopher, and he took every opportunity to observe every animal he could: wild and domestic, native and exotic, terrestrial and aquatic. He investigated morphology, habitat, behavior, and what he called “manner of life”; what parts were the same and what were different; how they ate and reproduced. He noted natural kinds and attempted various classifications. Broad groupings seemed obvious: birds were different from fish. Some animals had two feet, some four, others none. Some animals were “blooded”; some, like insects, were not. But when Aristotle began to look at generation, he found categories that cut across others and that seemed to fit a hierarchical system based on degrees of perfection as measured by degrees of natural heat. Thus warm- Page 1 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 27 March 2015 Animals and Ecological Science blooded viviparous animals were “hotter” and “more perfect” than oviparous animals, and so forth, down to those animals that he believed produced larva rather than eggs. This hierarchical system, later known as the “chain of being” or “ladder of nature,” proved to have remarkable staying power in Western thought. The chain of being was not only hierarchical but full, including every animal (and plant) that could be created. It was also unchanging, so that species were fixed in time and space. And it was teleological: nature always worked toward a purpose.1 From the outset, the natural history of animals did not consist merely of passive observation. Aristotle dissected many dead animals and a few living ones. He collected and preserved specimens. These remained essential practices for the science of natural history, as did recording observations in words and pictures. Natural history overlapped with other uses of animals: collections of exotic animals in menageries conferred prestige on their owners but also provided opportunities for naturalists to observe new species, and hunters and fishermen often provided materials for study. The Roman physician Galen (c. 129–210 CE) used animals in anatomical studies to learn about human function, but at the same time, he also learned about animals. Naturalists from antiquity to the nineteenth century followed Aristotle’s example and collected, dissected, and observed. Christians, Muslims, and Jews adopted Aristotle’s hierarchical concept of nature and scientists still refer to “higher” and “lower” animals. Beginning with the influx of New World animals to Europe in the sixteenth century, however, the chain of being began to fall apart. For example, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) did not quite know what to do with the armadillo, and he strained to fit it into a known niche on the chain of being. As translated by Edward Topsell (1572–1625) a half century later, the “Tatus or Guinean Beast” (“Guinean” in this era simply meant “foreign”), is brought for the most part out of the new-found world, and out of Guinia, and may therefore be safely conveyed into these parts, because it is naturally covered with a harde shell, devided and interlined like the fins of fishes, outwardly seeming buckled to the backe like coat-armor, within which, the beast draweth up his body, as a Hedghog doth within his prickled skin; and therefore I take it to be a Brazilian Hedghog.2 Gessner’s Historiae animalium (1551–1558) was one of a number of encyclopedic natural histories of the Renaissance that drew on the ancient Roman Pliny (23–79 CE). Pliny’s very popular Natural History surveyed all that was known about nature, mingling direct observation with a variety of textual sources of varying credibility. Aelian (170–230 CE) followed this model, as did Christian writers such as Isidore of Seville (560–636), who included a section on animals in his Etymologia, and Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), whose De animalibus both summarized Aristotle’s animal works (which Albertus reintroduced to the West) and displayed his own observations, particularly on the falcon. Gessner and his contemporaries, such as Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), made no attempt to classify beyond very general categories. The lack of consensus about classification among naturalists is evident in cabinets of curiosities, assembled in this period as physical counterparts to Renaissance natural history texts. Cabinets served as prototypes for natural history museums, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. A cabinet belonged to an individual and reflected that person’s tastes and interests. Usually a single large room, it functioned as a naturalist’s workplace and as a site of display, open or not to spectators. Collectors mingled natural history and antiquities, natural objects and made objects, using surprising juxtapositions to produce particular effects: aesthetic, moral, or philosophical. Unusual specimens and natural anomalies were particularly prized, but cabinets also documented the ordinary course of nature. Illustrated catalogs mapped the collections. For example, the cabinet of Italian apothecary Ferrante Imperato (1550–1625) featured many preserved animal specimens, with an emphasis on the rare and unusual—the diarist John Evelyn reported seeing chameleons and “an extraordinary greate Crocodile.”3 Preservation methods included drying and “wet” preparations in jars with some kind of preserving fluid, as well as taxidermy. Late seventeenth-century works of natural history, such as Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671–1676) of the Paris Academy of Sciences served as a kind of paper cabinet or paper menagerie, since it consisted of animals from Louis XIV’s menageries.4 The idiosyncratic organization of cabinets and such works as the Mémoires reflected continued debate about the proper criteria for classification. The ideal, a system that displayed the order of nature, seemed increasingly out of reach. Aristotle had attempted and failed to establish such a natural system. The naturalist John Ray (1627–1705), who edited the comprehensive natural history of birds of Francis Willughby (1635–1672), attempted at the end of the seventeenth century to outline a natural classification of animals, but it was generally viewed as too complex to Page 2 of 12 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Master Gratis Access; date: 27 March 2015 Animals and Ecological Science be useful. The discovery of the sexuality
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