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The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman animal interests is difficult.67 Humans are literally outweighed by farmed animals: land-based farmed animals have 70 percent more biomass than all humans.68 Land-based farmed animals also outnumber humans greatly, by a factor of three to one, with…
Meredith's worldplay was shot through with yet another well-recognized ingigredienlent of creative thinking, the comparison and synthesis of two or more unlike things. As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski famously expressed it, the discoveries of science and of art "are explorations—^more, are explosions, of…
at the end of the Pleistocene, certain human groups and their animal associates began progressively to show parallel reductions in size and stature, cranial gracilization, changes in post-cranial robusticity, shortening of the face and jaws, tooth crowding and malocclusion, and tooth-size reduction and simplification…
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as…
The Patriarch smiled and said, "Though you have rather a base sort of body, you look like one of the rhesus monkeys that eat pine seeds, and I ought to give you a surname that fits your appearance and call you Hu ('Macaque'). The elements that make up the character Hu are 'animal,' 'old' and 'moon'. What is old is…
Thus it might be said, that the vegetable is only the sketch, nor rather the ground-work of the animal; that for the formation of the latter, it has only been requisite to clothe the former with an apparatus of external organs, by which it might be connected with external objects. From hence it follows, that the…
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their…
Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie. Thus, next after lifeless things comes the plant, and of plants one will differ from another as to its amount…
If any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom an unworthy task, he must hold in like disesteem the study of man. For no one can look at the elements of the human frame—blood, flesh, bones, vessels, and the like—without much repugnance. Moreover, when anyone of the parts or structures, be it…
An intelligent patient, private or otherwise, to whom you have taken the trouble to explain the nature of the investigation, makes the best laboratory animal.
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the…
In 1917 the great Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Thompson wrote a book called On Growth and Form, in the last chapter of which he introduced his famous 'method of transformations'. * He would draw an animal on graph paper, and then he would distort the graph paper in a mathematically specifiable way and show that the form…
Textbooks of biology repeat time and again that DNA is a 'blueprint' for building a body. It isn't. A true blueprint of, say, a car or a house embodies a one-toone mapping from paper to finished product. It follows from this that a blueprint is reversible. It is as easy to go from house to blueprint as the other way…
Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the initiative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively…