The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science (review)

TITLES THAT MAY INTEREST YOU As a service to our readers whose specific interests span the full spectrum of the fields of biology and medicine, we are providing the titles of and relevant information about some of the books sent to us by the publishers that will not receive full review treatment. Whenever possible we will add a short description of each book. The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science. By Bernard E. Rollin. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990. Pp. 308. $14.95. This book is not anti-science. The author hopes that it will be viewed "as a constructive critique of questionable philosophical assumptions which underlie much current scientific activity, whose abandonment can only enhance the intellectual and moral validity of scientific efforts to understand the world." The issue of animal consciousness, especially of pain, forms the central theme of the book. The author hopes "to show that denial of subjective states in animals is not an essential feature of a scientific stance, but rather a contingent, historical aberration which can be changed—and indeed must be changed—to make science both coherent and morally responsible." The author traces the development of changing attitudes towards animals and shows how growing social concern about the way in which we treat them is forcing some scientists to re-evaluate their ideology or moral thinking about animals. Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880—1915. By Jane Maienschein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991. Pp. 366. $48.00. The author, a professor of philosophy and zoology, has written several books dealing with aspects of the history of biology in the United States. This book is a collective biography of four pioneers in biology: Edmund Beecher Wilson, Edwin Grant Conklin, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Ross Granville Harrison, all graduates of Johns Hopkins University. Although they were from similar backgrounds and shared experiences, their divergent research careers led to the revolutionary transformation of biology in America, leading away from the nineteenth-century traditions of morphology and physiology to the experimental developments in cytology, genetics and embryology (both evolutionary and experimental). "This is a story of individuals, and institutions, of scientific commitments, and 156 Book Reviews ...