Animal as Machine: The Quest to Understand How Animals Work and Adapt

The book explores the life, work, and ideas of scientists who subscribed to mechanistic concepts to explain how animals acquire and process food, breathe, circulate their blood, and sense their environment. It tells a remarkable and insightful story of the larger-than-life personalities and gripping historical episodes that marked the emergence and blossoming of animal physiology.

Format: Hardback
Publication date: 05 April 2022
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Through the ages, natural historians have grappled with the enigmatic nature of animal behavior, oscillating between vitalist beliefs in a soul animating bodily functions and mechanistic perspectives that view animal body parts as mere components of organic machinery. Animal as Machine delves into the lives, works, and ideas of scientists who, identifying as physiologists, embraced mechanistic concepts to explain how animals acquire and process food, breathe, circulate their blood, and sense their environment. As medical physiology flourished in the nineteenth century, zoologists sought to establish their own distinct physiology, grounded in understanding animal functions within the context of environmental adaptation and evolutionary forces. Physiological schools with distinct emphases emerged worldwide, shaping their outlooks. Animal physiologists, dividing their time between fieldwork in marine stations and laboratory experimentation, marveled at the remarkable diversity and ingenuity of the functional strategies employed by animals to survive. Animal as Machine unfolds a remarkable and insightful narrative, encompassing the larger-than-life personalities and captivating historical episodes that shaped the emergence and flourishing of animal physiology.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228010531