The third workshop of the "How Well Do 'Facts' Travel?" project was held on Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 April 2007. Examining boundaries important to the work of project research officer Edmund Ramsden, invited participants spoke about the ways in which facts about animals were interchangeable with facts about humans, and how discussions of the social and the natural might be affected by how those categories are conceived.
About the Workshop
After the Darwinian revolution, humanity was supposedly no longer above and apart from nature, but bounded within nature. But the naturalisation of man is neither simple nor direct. The assimilation of the human into the natural world is far from complete, and distinctions between the "natural" and the "social" endure.
The history of science provides many examples of the important role of animals as subjects in medicine, physiology, psychology, and genetics - providing data, methods and models important to the understanding of the human condition. While some transfers seem welcome, such as in animal and human physiology or in the discussions of stress in animal and human populations, other facts may be rejected, such as those not carried over from ethology into anthropology. Charges of anthropomorphism have abounded, but are challenged by an increasing number of ethologists, zoologists and psychologists who have sought to see human behaviour in animal terms or vice versa. As if to mark the process of assimilation, the categories of "human" and "animal" are sometimes collapsed into "human and non-human animals." Such terminology would be unnecessary if assimilation had not begun, but redundant if it were complete.
How and why are some boundaries more or less permeable to facts from beyond the frontier? And are facts better travellers than other elements of science (such as metaphors or models)? The purpose of the workshop was not to look at boundary work simply as a process of demarcation, but at the ways in which travelling facts enable conceptual exchanges between natural and social, animal and human. (The programme can be found here.)
Abstracts and Speakers
- Paul Erickson and Gregg Mitman - When Rabbits Became Human (And Humans, Rabbits): Stability, Order, and History in the Study of Populations / "Population" is a significant unit of analysis that mediates between natural and social sciences. Through examining several episodes in its historical epistemology, the presentation will explore the changing nature of facts in the history, biology, and economics of population, paying particular attention to the role of disease.
- Edmund Ramsden - From Rodent Utopia to Urban Crisis: Experiments in Crowding Pathology / Laboratory studies of crowding among non-human animals are often described as having had a profound influence upon human sciences such as environmental psychology, human ecology and social psychiatry. Focusing on the experiments of John B. Calhoun, the paper explores how social scientists have been eager to draw upon the evidence of crowding pathology that he provided, while carefully reinforcing the boundary between rodents and man.
- Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr. - Dilemmas in the Constitution and Exportation (or Importation) of Ethological Facts / This paper will explore the problems of constituting, exporting and importing perceived facts about animal behaviour. While both ethologists and comparative psychologists were prone to generalisation, there were significant disagreements over the ways in which species boundaries could be crossed, particular when this crossing involved the behaviour of Homo sapiens.
- Karen A. Rader - From Mice to "Men" and Back Again: A Rodent's History of the Animal-Human Boundary / Historically the laboratory mouse represents the most crucial 'model organism' for enabling animal-human boundary transgressions in twentieth-century biomedicine and public health policy. An early history of attempts to use scientific knowledge obtained from mouse research in radiation genetics and biomedical research, illuminates the importance of shifting political contexts and changing cultural meanings of animals. More recent attempts to question the integrity of the mouse-human boundary, have alternately weakened and fortified its power to police knowledge-making.
- Abigail Lustig - The Demise of "Society" as a Fact in Twentieth-Century Sociobiology / Biologists who studied social organisms and the evolution of sociality from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s took the existence of the "society" as a fact, a natural unit of biological organization in both literal and figurative senses. By 1966, societies were no longer facts; they were epiphenomena, as evolutionary biologists focused on selfish individuals and genes as the agents of evolution.
- Françoise Baylis - On the Path to Regenerative Medicine: Stem Cell Research and Crossing Species Boundaries / There is considerable controversy among scientists and policy-makers over the benefits and dangers of creating human-nonhuman embryonic chimeras for stem cell research. For some, such research is scientifically and ethically required. For others, it is both unnecessary and misguided. This presentation will explore how and why the putative "facts" to be generated by experiments involving interspecific organisms are valued by some communities while denied by others, and why it is deemed acceptable to cross certain species boundaries while avoiding others.
- Erika Milam - Choice or Ritual? Female Mating Behavior, Zoomorphism, and the Rise of Human Ethology, 1950-1975 / How does a hen decide if she is in the mood for sex? How does a hen decide who is the best rooster? For some scientists, rational choice was a uniquely human quality, while others have been fascinated by the idea that mating behaviour among animals could serve as an experimental entrée to mate choice in humans. The paper will explore how evidence of animal attraction and mating rituals have been transferred to the study of human love and courtship.
- Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - Formal and Compositional Styles of Social Insect Research / The developmental and evolutionary phenomena of social insect colonies have been analysed through a variety of biological research styles. A distinct, compositional, style of research on social insects can be seen in the inventive theories of the Chicago School of Ecology. The main philosophical goal of this paper is to track the reification and abstraction activities of different theories and general styles interpreting the "same" fact.
- Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys - Rabies and Hydrophobia in 19thC Britain: One Disease or Two? / Rabies was and is a transgressive disease. It crossed boundaries between animals and man, between body and mind, and between public and private. The paper will explore the changing faces of rabies in Britain in the nineteenth-century, assessing how well knowledge travelled between veterinarians, doctors, state officials, animal welfare activists, dog lovers and the public.
Speakers and Participants
- Jon Adams, LSE
- Rachel Ankeny, University of Adeleide
- Francoise Baylis, Dalhousie University
- Richard Burkhardt, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
- Paul Erickson, Wesleyan University
- Albane Forestier, LSE
- Thomas Gieryn, University of Indiana
- David Haycock, the National Maritime Museum
- Peter Howlett, LSE
- David Kirby, University of Manchester
- Sabina Leonelli, LSE
- Abigail Lustig, University of Texas at Austin
- Erika Mattila, LSE
- Julia Mensink, LSE
- Martina Merz, University of Lucerne
- Erika L. Milam, Clemson University
- Ashley Millar, LSE
- Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Mary Morgan, LSE
- Neil Pemberton, University of Manchester
- Karen A. Rader, Virginia Commonwealth University
- Gregory Radick, University of Leeds
- Ed Ramsden, LSE
- Max-Stephan Schulze, LSE
- Simona Valeriani, LSE
- Aashish Velkar, LSE
- Patrick Wallis, LSE
- Norton Wise, UCLA
- Rasmus Gronfeldt Winther, University of California, Santa Cruz
- Abigail Woods, Imperial College London
- Michael Worboys, University of Manchester