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Reinventing Primate Neuroscience for the Twenty-First Century

Todd M. Preuss

in Primate Neuroethology

This chapter advocates an evolutionary approach to understanding comparative brain anatomy in primates. It argues that deep understanding of the relationships between brain and behavior requires ... More

This chapter advocates an evolutionary approach to understanding comparative brain anatomy in primates. It argues that deep understanding of the relationships between brain and behavior requires determining how evolution modifies specific systems of neurons and their interconnections, and not just relating brain size to gross measures of cognition or behavior. Such neuroethological studies will require active management of captive and wild populations of primates needed for detailed comparison.Less

The Natural History of Man

Stephen Gaukroger

in The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841

The natural history of man comprises comparative anatomy; what in the eighteenth century was termed ‘physical geography’ (in more modern terms a mix of human geography and physical geography), which ... More

The natural history of man comprises comparative anatomy; what in the eighteenth century was termed ‘physical geography’ (in more modern terms a mix of human geography and physical geography), which attempts to identify the environmental factors that shape human behaviour; human variation, such as racial variation, and its significance; and the external marks of character, notably physiognomy, craniology, and phrenology. Crucial to this comparative exercise are the questions of whether there is any continuity between apes and humans, what the standing of seemingly half animal/half human feral children is, whether there is a continuity between human races or whether they have separate origins, whether physical differences between men and women extend beyond their reproductive organs, and more generally whether significant differences are due to environmental or intrinsic factors.Less

Indian Bones and What White Men Saw in Them

Tim Fulford

in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756-1830

This chapter focuses on white theories about the racial and cultural origin of Indians.

The “Normal State” in French Anatomical and Physiological Discourse of the 1820s and 1830s

Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens

in Normality: A Critical Genealogy

The term “normal” first came into usage in French anatomy in the early 1820s. It was used to refer to organs that were fixed in their roles and highly integrated with those around them. In this ... More

The term “normal” first came into usage in French anatomy in the early 1820s. It was used to refer to organs that were fixed in their roles and highly integrated with those around them. In this sense, the normal was not thought as the opposite of the abnormal. It simply referred to a law-governed regularity. A binary usage did emerge a few years later in physiology, where the normal state was opposed to pathological ones. So almost from the outset there was divergence between disciplines about the value of the term. A further question arose in teratology: was it appropriate to think of the normal state as one that simply occurred more frequently than any other, thus allowing monstrosity to be defined by its rarity? In fact some forms of monstrosity were found relatively often, whereas anatomical perfection was a rare thing indeed. These conceptual difficulties proved to be intractable for medical thinking during the 1820s and 1830s. A high-profile debate that took place in 1831 gave a sharp polemical edge to disagreement, but led to no resolution. Even as medical thinkers went on speaking about the normal state, they continued to equivocate between qualitative (law-governed) and quantitative (frequentist) thinking.Less

Conclusion

Anita Guerrini

in The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris

The French played a distinctive role in the many comparative anatomies of this era. Perrault and the Academy joined anatomy closely to natural history and did not assume uniformity in nature, unlike ... More

The French played a distinctive role in the many comparative anatomies of this era. Perrault and the Academy joined anatomy closely to natural history and did not assume uniformity in nature, unlike most mechanical philosophers. Ideas about animal mechanism were indeed diverse and eclectic, and LeClerc and Manget’s 1685 Bibliotheca anatomica included several variations on this theme. The Academy’s comparative anatomy also contributed to discussions of classification and the definition of species. Anatomy in seventeenth-century Paris formed part of a wider cultural milieu that intertwined intellectual and courtly activities, where ancient and modern ideas coexisted as well as clashed. The honnêtes hommes of the academies and salons of Paris mingled science, art, music, and literature as interdependent forms of knowledge.Less

Correlation Crosses the Channel

Gowan Dawson

in Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

This chapter explores the Franco-German contexts in which the law of correlation originated, and also considers how Cuvier’s law was used to thwart the transmutationism of Lamarck. It examines ... More

This chapter explores the Franco-German contexts in which the law of correlation originated, and also considers how Cuvier’s law was used to thwart the transmutationism of Lamarck. It examines Cuvier’s rhetorical presentation of his law, and his significant silence on religion. With a particular focus on Edinburgh and translations of Cuvier’s anatomical and geological writings, the chapter shows how, in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a myriad of different, and often competing, interpretations of the savant, whose works could be repackaged to endorse both conservative and radical, as well as religious and heretical purposes. The law of correlation itself was often more amenable to the interests of radical materialists than to conservative theologians looking to bolster revealed theology.Less

The Animal Projects of the Paris Academy of Sciences

Anita Guerrini

in The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris

In the last third of the seventeenth century, the Paris Academy of Sciences pursued two dissection projects, of exotic animals and of living and dead domestic animals coupled with the dissection of ... More

In the last third of the seventeenth century, the Paris Academy of Sciences pursued two dissection projects, of exotic animals and of living and dead domestic animals coupled with the dissection of human cadavers. These projects led to a new experimental comparative anatomy that valued animals as models for humans and as legitimate objects of knowledge in themselves. Claude Perrault led the Academy’s anatomical work, establishing a style of experimenting, collaboration, and publication that set it apart from other European academies. New anatomical subjects included exotic animals from the royal menageries at Vincennes and Versailles. The Academy based its Christian vitalism on Perrault’s mechanistic but non-Cartesian theory of animal mechanism.Less

Comparative Anatomies: Re-Visions of Racial Science

Britt Rusert

in Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture

This chapter examines how Black and Afro-Native ethnologies published in the 1830s and early 1840s resisted the racist visual cultures of comparative anatomy, including craniology and ethnology. The ... More

This chapter examines how Black and Afro-Native ethnologies published in the 1830s and early 1840s resisted the racist visual cultures of comparative anatomy, including craniology and ethnology. The ethnologies of Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and James W. C. Pennington challenged the tethering of the black body to visual representations of pathology in both science and popular culture through the production of a counter-archive of visual culture, as well as through ekphrastic re-visions of the Black, Native American, and Afro-Native body.Less

The Ethnographic Moment

in The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt

This chapter, which explores the site of knowledge production in Egypt and its co-production by Europeans and non-Europeans alike, examines the role of anthropological ideas and practices in the ... More

This chapter, which explores the site of knowledge production in Egypt and its co-production by Europeans and non-Europeans alike, examines the role of anthropological ideas and practices in the development of a social-scientific mode of thought in Egypt. It compares the development of a colonial and an incipient local, or Egyptian, mode of knowledge production in the anthropology of the modern Egyptians. The chapter argues that, despite the existence of a shared culture of anthropology and geography, subtle differences began to emerge, particularly in the heated anti-colonial climate of the interwar period as intellectual production was transformed by political conditions. It first considers the establishment of the Royal Geographic Society of Egypt before turning to Onofrio Abbate Pasha and his use of a biological paradigm in which native difference was described on the basis of physiology, psychology, and comparative anatomy, rather than the classical emphasis on Oriental philology and religion. The chapter also looks at studies in ethnography in Egypt, along with Egyptian folklore and pharaonic and pre-Islamic customs.Less

Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Histoire des animaux

Anita Guerrini

in The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris

Although the Histoire des animaux had limited circulation in its first incarnation, it had a long afterlife. Following Duverney’s death in 1730, a complete revised edition of the project was ... More

Although the Histoire des animaux had limited circulation in its first incarnation, it had a long afterlife. Following Duverney’s death in 1730, a complete revised edition of the project was undertaken under the guidance of the Academy’s secretary Fontenelle, which appeared in three volumes in 1733–34. Five years later, Buffon took control of the Jardin du roi, and his appointment of Daubenton in the 1740s signaled the revival of comparative anatomy in Paris, made evident in the volumes they jointly undertook of Histoire naturelle between 1749 and 1767. Buffon self-consciously took up where Perrault and Duverney left off.Less

Molecular Evolution vis-à-vis Paleontology

Francisco J. Ayala

in The Paleobiological Revolution: Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology

This chapter examines the relationship between evidence for evolution provided by molecular biology and the paleontological evidence in the fossil record. It highlights the continued tension between ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between evidence for evolution provided by molecular biology and the paleontological evidence in the fossil record. It highlights the continued tension between paleontological and biological approaches to evolutionary theory and evaluates whether molecular data establishes a more reliable evolutionary clock than the fossil record. This chapter suggests that molecular evolutionary studies have three notable advantages over paleontology, comparative anatomy, and other classical disciplines. These include quantifiable information, multiplicity, and comparability of very different types of organisms.Less

Anatomy

Richard E. Passingham and James B. Rowe

in A Short Guide to Brain Imaging: The Neuroscience of Human Cognition

Once the statistical analysis has been performed, the location of the activations has to be established. The importance of this step lies in the fact that the location provides a link to the ... More

Once the statistical analysis has been performed, the location of the activations has to be established. The importance of this step lies in the fact that the location provides a link to the anatomical connections, since it is these that constrain the functions of the area. Each cortical area has a unique overall pattern of extrinsic connections, and it is this connectional fingerprint that provides the anatomical basis for functional localization. Thus, it is critical that an activation is assigned to the correct area, and that the localization is not described in terms of a general region, if within that region there are subareas with different connections. One can account for the function in terms of the anatomical connections. The identification of the correct cytoarchitectonic area usually depends on the warping of the image so that it fits a standardized template and the use of a probabilistic atlas to identify the most likely area for the activation.Less