Carey's book on conceptual change and the accompanying argument that children's biology initially is organized in terms of naïve psychology has sparked a great detail of research and debate. This body of research on children's biology has, however, been almost exclusively been based on urban, majority culture children in the US or in other industrialized nations. The development of folkbiological knowledge may depend on cultural and experiential background. If this is the case, then urban majority culture children may prove to (...) be the exception rather than the rule, because plants and animals do not play a significant role in their everyday life. Urban majority culture children, rural majority culture children, and rural Native American children were given a property projection task based on Carey's original paradigm. Each group produced a unique profile of development. Only urban children showed evidence for early anthropocentrism, suggesting that the co-mingling of psychology and biology may be a product of an impoverished experience with nature. In comparison to urban majority culture children even the youngest rural children generalized in terms of biological affinity. In addition, all ages of Native American children and the older rural majority culture children gave clear evidence of ecological reasoning. These results show that both culture and expertise play a role in the development of folkbiological thought. (shrink)

Recent research on the cognitive abilities and emotional capacities of animals has fueled the animal rights movement and renewed debate over the differences between human and non-human animals. This debate has not been central to sociology, although George Herbert Mead drew a very hard line between humans and animals by asserting that the latter were not capable of symbolic interaction. Sociologists are now beginning to question this assumption, and this article falls within this new line of research. We begin by (...) presenting alternative interpretations of symbolic interaction that allow for the possibility of such activity in non-human animals. We review recent research on symbolic interaction between humans and dogs, and we present our own research findings on human-feline interaction. We conclude that there is growing evidence that symbolic interaction is widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom, and that it enables animals to survive more effectively in a wide variety of environments. (shrink)

In this eloquent and sympathetic book, Evernden evaluates the international environmental movement and the underlying assumptions that could doom it to failure.