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This chapter studies the eye designs of the animal kingdom. Today, there are ten generally recognized optical eye types that have evolved in various branches of the animal kingdom. Whereas vertebrates possess only one of them, invertebrates possess all ten, from simple assemblies of photoreceptors that underlie phototaxis to advanced compound and camera eyes that support a sophisticated range of visual behaviors. Some invertebrates even possess several eyes of more than one type. The chapter identifies some of these eye types in the context of sensitivity and resolution, namely, pigment-pit eyes, compound eyes, and camera eyes. The last of these are characteristic of the vertebrates, although they are also commonplace among the invertebrates. The remaining nine eye types are found only within the invertebrates.

This chapter considers how Disney packages and sells nature as part of its collection of goods at the Disney Animal Kingdom Theme Park. It addresses Disney's influence as a cultural producer and its longstanding project of reimagining nature, which culminated most recently in the construction of the Animal Kingdom. It explores Disney's efforts to remake itself as an agent of conservation through its “Environmentality” program and projects like the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund. It concludes with a discussion of Disney's role as a biopolitical institution that enframes nature, and draws out lessons about how one of the most influential corporations in the world acts as an agent in the construction of a particular brand of green governmentality.

This chapter, like the previous one, focuses on particular facilities at the Walt Disney World Resort where there exist certain implications for the perception of Africa in American popular culture. In this chapter, the focus is on Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge (DAKL), which focuses solely on Africa and Africans. To be specific, DAKL presents an Africa south of the Sahara, a geographic divide that distinguishes between Arab Africa to the north and black Africa to the south. A closer look at DAKL reveals that the experience is conceived as a safari which re-creates the African savanna in Florida. At the lodge, visitors can eat African food, watch African animals roam, and learn about African cultures. The problem that the chapter addresses, however, is similar to the problems in representation that were evident in the previous cases. Like them, the Africa at DAKL is nature and animals, operating as stereotypes and thus producing negative resonances and problematic implications.

This chapter considers human relations with the animal kingdom. Throughout much of human history, most cultural and religious traditions—with some notable exceptions, such as Daoism—have valued humans over animals. The chapter presents the argument that it is morally justifiable to posit a moral hierarchy with humans on top, but only if accompanied by the principle that humans should not be cruel to animals. But the principle of “subordination without cruelty” is not sufficient to spell out the kinds of obligations we owe to animals. Humans have different kinds of relations with different animals, and the strongest obligations of care are owed to animals with human-like traits and that contribute most to human well-being. In the case of animals bred for human consumption, the chapter argues that such subordination is only justified if the animals are bred in humane conditions that are exceptionally rare in the modern world. Furthermore, the chapter states that we owe least to ugly animals that harm humans, but the principle of subordination without cruelty applies even in the case of the nastiest animals.

The moral entanglements of human-animal relations have complex histories, as evidenced in anthropology’s longstanding interest in the relevance of interspecies encounters in shaping social worlds. This chapter begins with a history of my ethnographic project. I then discuss the long-term anthropological engagement with moral systems and the disciplinary relevance of the term ethos, where quotidian thought and action are central anthropological concerns. Ethos offers a potent approach to the study of science, where regulatory ethical frameworks overshadow the everyday and ordinary. I clarify the book’s terminology, with an important distinction between ethics (codified bioethical principles) and the unscripted, personal moral responses that animals inspire in the humans who work with them. Different animals inspire different moral responses; mammalian species are especially affectively potent, and certain kinds of animals (rats, dogs, monkeys) enable me to track different sorts of moral responses among lab personnel. As a result, certain kinds of animals will figure as a means to foreground particular themes and sentiments. I situate this work within the context of animal studies and science and technology studies, and I track the history of animal welfare and activism, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. The chapter concludes with an overview of my study. I also explain the relevance of the book’s three overarching sections, “Intimacy,” “Sacrifice,” and “Exceptionalism.”

Adam and Eve were a black–white couple. This is at least the way in which they have been depicted on an eighteenth-century door panel of the Alte (formerly Gärtnersche) Apotheke, a pharmacy in Calw near Stuttgart, Germany. The panel—part of a sequence on the nature realms from which medicines are taken—depicts the animal kingdom (regnum animale) as a paradise scene in which a landscape that opens to a bay is cheerfully inhabited by many land and air animals, including a stag and a lion (in the foreground center), birds, monkeys, a sheep, a goat, and a dog. On the lower right of the painting, under a leafy tree, a seated white and presumably male nude is seen from behind looking up at another nude figure, a black woman who is leaning against the tree. Both are pointing with one hand each at the Edenic landscape.

Among the animal species that share some kind of common ancestor with humans there are many, in addition to the four species of great ape that apparently also share some kind of intelligence. Such shared intelligence might be due to common descent in some; in others it might be due to convergence — common evolutionary processes operating on a common inheritance, but independently. The argument of this chapter is that understanding intelligence in these more remote relatives has something to contribute to the understanding of the hominid mind. It outlines a few basic principles of modern evolutionary theory. It also considers what might form the common cognitive inheritance of all mammals, and therefore the foundation on which the extraordinary cognitive evolution of the primates must have been built. The chapter considers where else in the animal kingdom human-like intelligence can be found, so that we can consider what selective pressures might have been critical in recent hominid evolution.

In Systema Naturæ (1735, 1758), Carolus Linnaeus proposed a definition of the Kingdom Animalia: natural objects that grow, live, and sense. In contrast, plants grow and live but do not sense, while minerals grow but do not live or sense. In this definition of the animal kingdom, species are arranged in classes, families, and genera. This division of organisms into animals and plants was almost unchallenged for more than 100 years. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel came up with the first classification of living beings based on Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution. He separated the Kingdom Animalia from the new Kingdom Protista based on the possession of tissues and organs. Today, the animal kingdom is restricted to multicellular animals, that is, the Metazoa. This chapter provides an overview of metazoans, including their apomorphies, sexual reproduction and life cycle, and genes involved in organising the metazoan body. It also describes some of the metazoan morphological characters, including cilia and flagella, choanocytes, cell junctions and epithelia.

This chapter first takes on the task of defining the key terms that are to be used in the rest of the book. It first defines a genome, and then goes on to discuss the many terms surrounding it. The genome, first and foremost, is one's unique biology both as an individual within the human species, as well as the member of a distinct species within the animal kingdom. The genome, as it is popularly known, refers to the set of genes unique to an individual. It is important to know, however, that genome is more than just genes. In essence, the rest of the chapter gives a brief yet crucial introductory minimum of knowledge about the human genome and the associated molecular biology required for informed analysis and interpretation of a personal genome.