Animals in Science

Animals have so far attracted both philosophers and scientists: they have been studied for different purposes, either to understand their nature or to define the relationship between human beings and animals.

Any modern scientist will tell you that Aristotle was, in this as in other provinces of knowledge, a most astonishingly gifted pioneer, a really faithful observer […].

(James, 1931: 1)

That is, Aristotle’s History of Animals is considered to be a pioneer work that deals with animals. Animals are also studied in the Physiologus, “which dates probably from the second century A.D. and which may have originated in Alexandria” (Clark and McMunn, 1989: 2). The Physiologus, a “text of late antique animal literature” (2), is the text in which bestiary finds its origin (2).

The bestiaries, or books of beasts, are collections of animal descriptions and lore, both real and fantastic, which are interpreted as spiritual or moral lessons and

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often provided with illustrations. Topoi originating in or popularized by the bestiaries are found in diverse media from the Middle Ages to the present day. (1)

Bestiaries then, while giving the descriptions of animals, also give moral lessons. What makes bestiaries scientific is that they are the sources for people to “lear[n] in natural history […] the nature of animals” (Theobald, 1928: 53). Then one can conclude that animal studies go back to earlier ages, and these studies aim at both describing the animal nature and giving moral lessons related to Christianity. In the Renaissance humanist understanding, however, animals are examined with a different perspective.

As stated previously, humanism is an anthropocentric movement that situates human beings on top of other living and non-living beings. For humanists, all living and non-living beings serve human beings to better their life standards, and animals are one of these beings used and/or abused for the sake of humans. Then for humanists,

[t]he animal is the necessary, familiar and much cherished other of anthropos.

This familiarity, however, is fraught with perils. In a brilliant mock taxonomy, Louis Borges classified animals into three groups: those we watch television with, those we eat and those we are scared of. These exceptionally high levels of lived familiarity confine the human–animal interaction within classical parameters, namely, an oedipalized relationship (you and me together on the same sofa); an instrumental (thou shalt be consumed eventually) and a fantasmatic one (exotic, extinct infotainment objects of titillation). (Braidotti, 2013: 68)

That is, animals are the others of human beings. As understood from Braidotti, they are otherized in three respects for Borges, and in all of these respects human beings have the superior position, through which they ab/use animals to fulfil their own desires. The second relationship between animals and human beings unravels how scientifically

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animals are ab/used. Braidotti explains this second relationship in its relation to “market economy and labour force” (70):

Since antiquity, animals have constituted a sort of zoo-proletariat, in a species hierarchy run by the humans. They have been exploited for hard labour, as natural slaves and logistical supports for humans prior to and throughout the mechanical age. They constitute, moreover, an industrial resource in themselves, animal bodies being primary material products starting from milk and their edible meat, but think also of the tusks of elephants, the hides of most creatures, the wool of sheep, the oil and fat of whales, the silk of caterpillars, etc. (70)

After touching upon the relationship economically, she then relates this instrumentality of animals to their scientific abusement: she talks about how they are used as test objects “for our bio-technological agriculture, the cosmetics industry, drugs and pharmaceutical industries and other sectors of the economy” (70), so how they are cloned, as in the cases of Oncomouse and Dolly²¹, for the sake of human beings (70).

In advanced capitalism, animals of all categories and species have been turned into tradable disposable bodies, inscribed in a global market of post-anthropocentric exploitation. (70)

Just like Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway touches on animals’ being ab/used for their instrumentality or utility for human beings. In her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:

The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Haraway points out the late 19^th and 20^th century

21Francis Fukuyama states in her Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) that “[i]t took nearly 270 failed attempts before Dolly was successfully cloned” (2002: 78), and “nearly 30 percent of all animals […] have been cloned since then” (78).

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psychologist Robert Mearns Yerkes’ studies on animals. To be more precise, Haraway points out Yerkes’ studies on wild primate behaviour and “the utility of primates for interpreting the place of human beings in […] nature” (1991: 46).

Then the question should be why animals are used for the so-called betterment of the human beings. Although it may seem paradoxical, the answer is, in fact, easy: they are used because they share similar features to human beings, which is what humanists may question dubiously. “For instance, animals suffer from many of the same chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, asthma and arthritis as humans.”

(Braidotti: 2013, 162) That is to say, they have the similar potentialities of diseases human beings can have. It is one of the reasons why they are scientifically used for and by human beings.

Then there lies another question, and it is why or how animals have the similar potentialities of diseases human beings can have. In Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (2005), Neil Badmington states that “we share 98 percent of our genes with apes and fully 90 percent of them with mice” (2005: 31). Ernst Mayr, who focuses on Charles Darwin and genealogy of human beings in What Makes Biology Unique?

Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (2004), also claims that chimpanzees and human beings are similar in many respects:

We share 98% of our genes, and many of our proteins – for instance, haemoglobin – are identical. It has become obvious in recent years that, in a philosophical study of humans, dealing with such questions as the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and human altruism, one can no longer ignore the origin of these human capacities in our anthropoid ancestors. (2004: 87).

Mayr goes on explaining that after “Australopithecus africanus”, Australopithecines, two-million-year-old human fossils, were considered to be the

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origins of human beings although they were more like chimpanzees for Mayr because of the same brain size²² they had. (197) However, Mayr, who explains Darwin’s theory of evolution in his work, also accepts that those fossils were “the intermediate link between chimpanzees and Homo” (197). Just like Ernst Mayr, Francis Fukuyama touches upon the similarities between chimpanzees, macaques, elephants, and human beings. For Fukuyama, “[c]himpanzees are more humanlike than macaques” (2002:

144) as they have the little human talk and the sense of abashment, and elephants are like human beings because they mourn as humans do (144-145).

Then, for Darwin and Darwinian theorists, human beings share some similar genes with animals. It is for this reason that for such theorists like Morrey below, scientifically animals and human beings have a connection to one another:

The implication of all this, of course, is that human beings, if they are indeed comparable to all other animals, are no more free than other animals, that is to say that they are just as tied to their genetic inheritance and species-level instinct [.]

(Morrey, 2013: 156)

This tie also highlights that human beings are bound to other non-human beings in the universe. Namely, what human beings otherize, animals in this case, are, in fact, determiners of the position of human beings. They make themselves superior to these beings, and they also define themselves or what a human being is via this other.

Therefore, considering the position of human beings, “‘[t]he animal’ [which] has long been other to the construction of ‘the human,’” (Schmeink, 2016: 82) has now a different position with posthumanism because, unlike humanism, posthumanism

22 Mayr states that the brain size in both was 450 cubic centimetres two million years ago (2004: 197); Australopithecines’ brain size became 700-900 cubic centimetres in time (200), and homo sapiens have now the brain size of 1,350 cubic centimetres (201).

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foregrounds the human-non-human relation and highlights that human beings do not have a separate and individual position in the world; instead, they share the same universe with other living or non-living beings, which means that human beings need to revise the conception of what a human being is by means of the external determiners of who or what this human being is.