In America by the 1930s, albino rats had become a kind of generic standard in research on physiology and behavior that de-emphasized diversity across species. However, prior to about 1915, the early work of many of the pioneer rat researchers in America and in central Europe reflected a strong interest in species differences and a deep regard for diversity. These scientists sought broad, often medical, generality, but their quest for generality using a standard animal did not entail a de-emphasis of (...) organic diversity. They chose white rats as test animals for two primary reasons. First, rats develop very slowly. They therefore made features of physiological, neural and psychological development accessible to the experimental method at a time when its application to the phenomena of development remained controversial. Secondly, rats were thought to have unusually strong sex drives. For this reason they became central to the experimental study of sexuality and, in the work of the reproductive physiologist Eugen Steinach, sexual development. Connections among three research institutes that stressed experimental approaches to the study of brain and development demonstrate the importance of the rat's institutional role. As the emphasis on experimentation in the study of development grew, two of these institutes bred rats to provide uniform materials. Eventually, however, their reasons for selecting rats were lost; and the ready availability of a uniform test animal led to a shift in scientists' presumptions about diversity, as the standard rat became a tool for assuring generality. (shrink)

In 1942 a coalition of twenty scientific societies formed the Conference on the Supply of Experimental Animals in an attempt to pressure the Medical Research Council to accept responsibility for the provision of standardised experimental animals in Britain. The practice of animal experimentation was subject to State regulation under the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, but no provision existed for the provision of animals for experimental use. Consequently, day-to-day laboratory work was reliant on a commercial small animal market which (...) had emerged to sustain the hobby of animal fancying. This paper explores how difficulties encountered in experimental practice within the laboratory led to the problematisation of biomedical science’s reliance upon a commercial market for animals during the inter-war period. This is shown to have produced a crisis within animal reliant experimental science in the early 1940s which enabled the left-wing Association of Scientific Workers to cast science’s reliance on a free market as economically inefficient and a threat to the reliability of British research. It is argued that the development of standard experimental animals in Britain was, therefore, embedded within the wider cultural, societal, political and economic national context of the time. (shrink)

Histories of psychology regularly celebrate the foundational role played in the development of early American psychology by Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, and in particular the development of functional psychology and behaviorism. In this article it is argued that although Darwin's theory did play an influential role, early American psychology did not generally reflect the hereditarian determinism of his theory of evolution by natural selection. However, early American psychologists did accept one critical implication of Darwin's theory, which is (...) that evolution by natural selection does not ensure the highest development of the human race. This partly explains the social interventive zeal that was a distinctive feature of early American psychology. (shrink)

Robert Yerkes is a pivotal figure in American psychology and primatology in the first half of the twentieth century. As is well known, Yerkes first studied ape intelligence in 1915, on a visit to the private California laboratory of the psychiatrist Gilbert Hamilton, a former student. Less widely appreciated is how far the work done at the Hamilton lab, in its aims and ambitions as well as its techniques, served as a template for much of Yerkes’s research thereafter. This paper (...) uses the Hamilton–Yerkes relationship to re-examine Yerkes’s career and, more generally, that of American psychology in the early twentieth century. Three points especially are emphasized: first, the role of Freudian psychoanalysis as a spur to Hamilton’s experimental studies of ape intelligence; second, the importance of Hamilton’s laboratory, with its semi-wild population of monkeys and ape, as a model for Yerkes’s efforts to create a laboratory of his own; and third, the influence on Yerkes of Hamilton’s optimism about experimental psychological studies of nonhuman primates as a source of lessons beneficial to a troubled human world. (shrink)

This essay aims to shed new light on the relations between physiology and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on the use of unicellular organisms as research objects during that period. Within the frameworks of evolutionism and monism advocated by Ernst Haeckel, protozoa were perceived as objects situated at the borders between organism and cell and individual and society. Scholars such as Max Verworn, Alfred Binet, and Herbert Spencer Jennings were provoked by these organisms to (...) undertake experimental investigations situated between general physiology and psychology that differed from the physiological psychology advocated by Wilhelm Wundt. Some of these investigations sought to locate psychological properties in the molecular structure of protoplasm; others stressed the existence of organic and psychological individuality in protozoa. In the following decades, leading philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Henri Bergson, as well as psychological researchers like Sigmund Freud, integrated the results of these investigations into their reflections on such problems as the nature of the will, the structure of the ego, and the holistic nature of the reactions of organisms to their environment. (shrink)

‘Morgan's canon’ is a rule for making inferences from animal behaviour about animal minds, proposed in 1892 by the Bristol geologist and zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, and celebrated for promoting scepticism about the reasoning powers of animals. Here I offer a new account of the origins and early career of the canon. Built into the canon, I argue, is the doctrine of the Oxford philologist F. Max Müller that animals, lacking language, necessarily lack reason. Restoring the Müllerian origins of the (...) canon in turn illuminates a number of changes in Morgan's position between 1892 and 1894. I explain these changes as responses to the work of the American naturalist R. L. Garner. Where Morgan had a rule for interpreting experiments with animals, Garner had an instrument for doing them: the Edison cylinder phonograph. Using the phonograph, Garner claimed to provide experimental proof that animals indeed spoke and reasoned. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay presents a historical epistemology of the nineteenth‐century controversy concerning a scientific hoax, the Cardiff giant. My focus is on the shifting meanings given to the giant, which were based on epistemologies derived from scientific authority, religious belief, and market relations. In 1869 a farmer in Cardiff, New York, claimed to have discovered the fossilized remains of a prehistoric, perhaps biblical, giant on his property. While some scientists stressed the need to cooperate with commercial showmen, enthusiasm for the (...) giant incited the ire of others, who sought to debunk it and the culture that sustained it. Drawing on local newspaper reports, memoirs, nineteenth‐century exposés, and publicity materials associated with the giant’s display, I link the episode to the history of popular and scientific observation. The giant was a particularly troubling spectacle because as an object of inquiry it blurred the modern boundaries separating nature, society, and religion. (shrink)

In 1967, American biologist Adrian Wenner (1928-) launched an extensive challenge to Karl von Frisch's (1886-1982) theory that bees communicate to each other the direction and distance of food sources by a symbolic dance language. Wenner and various collaborators argued that bees locate foods solely by odors. Although the dispute had largely run its course by 1973 -- von Frisch was awarded a Nobel Prize, while Wenner withdrew from active bee research -- it offers us a rare window into mid-twentieth (...) century discussions about animals, language, and cognition. Historians, sociologists, and scientists have commented on the debate and its outcome, but none has seriously questioned why von Frisch and Wenner pursued such different explanations of the bees' dances. In this paper, I explore von Frisch and Wenner's differing visions of animals and their behaviors and show how these contributed to their respective positions. Von Frisch's early-twentieth-century training in experimental physiology disposed him to focus on individual animals, their abilities, and their behaviors' evolutionary significance. Wenner, by contrast, was trained in mathematics and statistics and the Schneirla school of behavior. He viewed the bees' behaviors probabilistically with an eye toward the entire hive and its surroundings and ultimately explained them in terms of simple stimulus--response conditioning. Finally, while the debate was resolved in von Frisch's favor, he neither waged nor won the battle by himself. Instead, I show that practitioners, whose agendas ranged from the nascent fields of sociobiology to cognitive ethology, took up the cause of the communicating bees. (shrink)

Place, practice and status have played significant and interacting roles in the complex history of primatology during the early to mid-twentieth century. This paper demonstrates that, within the emerging discipline of primatology, the field was understood as an essential supplement to laboratory work. Founders argued that only in the field could primates be studied in interaction with their natural social group and environment. Such field studies of primate behavior required the development of existing and new field techniques. The practices and (...) sites developed by American primatologist Clarence Ray Carpenter were used to demonstrate that scientific standards could be successfully applied to the study of primates in the field. In an environment in which many field biologists fought for higher scientific status, Carpenter gradually adopted increasingly interventionist techniques. These techniques raised epistemological problems for studies whose value rested on the naturalness of the behaviors observed. Thus, issues of status shaped field practices and subsequently altered Carpenter's criteria for what constituted natural primate behavior. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the “new education” reform movement that found object lessons and experience‐based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related (...) curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas—gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell—into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States. (shrink)

Focusing on Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies as a case, this article uses economies of research tool exchange to develop a new way of characterizing cross-disciplinary research. Throughout its life from 1960 to 1972, the Center for Cognitive Studies hosted scholars from several disciplines. However, there were two different research cultures at the Center. With its directors and patrons committed to a philosophy that equated creative science with eclectic search for and invention of new tools, the Center's initial interdisciplinary research (...) culture emphasized the exchange of ideas and methods. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's multidisciplinary economy involved researchers working in parallel. (shrink)

In summary, the creation and maintenance of the Wistar Rats as standardized animals can be attributed to the breeding work of Helen Dean King, coupled with the management and husbandry methods of Milton Greenman and Louise Duhring, and with supporting documentation provided by Henry Donaldson. The widespread use of the Wistar Rats, however, is a function of the ingenuity of Milton Greenman who saw in them a way for a small institution to provide service to science. Greenman's rhetoric, as captured (...) in his Director's Reports, prepared annually from 1905 until his death in 1937, shows that he was unusually sensitive to his times and to the economics of science and of society. In the era when biology was being defined, he recognized in the rat the potential to be a living analog to the pure chemicals that legitimated experimental science. From management literature he extracted the ideals of uniformity of product, standards of quality, and efficiency of production, applying them to scientific practice to generate an animal model that thrives as standard equipment in laboratories throughout the world today.I will close with a quote from Frederick W. Taylor that is a cogent statement of the contribution to science and scientific progress made by standardized tools and their creators. Equating the surgeon and the workman, Taylor wrote: [He is given] the finest implements, each one of which has been the subject of special study and development ... [and] the very best knowledge of his predecessors; and, provided with standard implements and methods which represent the best knowledge of the world up to date, he is able to use his own originality and ingenuity to make real additions to the world's knowledge, instead of reinventing things which are old.Standardized tools, whether surgeons' implements or laboratory-bred rats, are one of the vehicles for carrying scientific knowledge forward from generation to generation. In this sense, Greenman's Wistar Rats have done their job, in his words, of “providing service to science.”. (shrink)