Where have all the animals gone?

In 1998, in a foreword to a comprehensive illustrated guide for the classification of animals in relation to all other forms of life, Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "modern training in zoology is now so full of abstract theory that old-fashioned knowledge of organic diversity has, unfortunately taken a back seat".  In fact zoology as the specialised study of the anatomical diversity of animals and their development had reached its apogee a century earlier.  Since then, animals in all their variety of sizes, shapes, lifestyles and interrelationships have gradually disappeared from the education system. 

Zoology may be traced back to the first dissectionists of the Italian Renaissance who explored the human body, such as Michelangelo and Marcello Malpighi.  Renaissance zoology was synonymous with comparative anatomy, which gradually become an obligatory part of preliminary courses for medical students.  University departments of zoology, often with their integral departmental museum of bones and stuffed skins, continued this tradition as the lynch pin of first year medical education until the 1960s. 

One of the first student texts to support the study of zoology was 'Zoological science, or, Nature in living form: adapted to elucidate the chart of the animal kingdom'.  This was published in the United States by Anna Maria Redfield in 1858, and the remainder of the century saw a proliferation of textbooks, which reinforced the type system of teaching, where dissections of frogs, earthworms, cockroaches, crayfish, dogfish and rabbits constituted the main practical work. An important textbook marker of the academic history of zoology in the United Kingdom is Gilbert Bourne's two-volume student text ' An introduction to the study of the comparative anatomy of animals'.  First published in 1900, it ran into six editions, the last revision of nearly 700 pages being published in 1919.   By this time, zoology was well established as a distinct university subject leading to a named honours degree.   It is significant that Bourne's book did not include zoology in the title.  Although comparative anatomy dominated zoology lectures and practicals, other functional divisions of animal life, such as parasitology and limnology were often additional obligatory courses.

Gilbert Bourne was the fifth Linacre Professor of Zoology in the University of Oxford from 1906 to 1921.  His department traced its origins to 1857, the foundation coinciding with the opening of the University Museum, where zoological research and teaching were then based. George Rolleston, the first holder of the Linacre Chair, had been given responsibility for the zoological collections at the Museum, other than the entomology collections, which remained as a separate department.  This highlights a common thread in university zoology where departments tended to crystallise around mounted skeletons of vertebrates, which had been collected by private enthusiasts who were usually medical doctors.

The University of London has a prior claim to zoology as a science in that the first professor was appointed in 1836 in the 'Department of General Literature and Science'. Zoology was taught in the 'Evening Classes Department' at King's College from 1861 and Comparative Anatomy and Zoology in the 'Medical Department' from 1874. The subsequent history of King's College is a general model for the development of the subject.  Animal Biology was a component of the 'Department of Physiology, Practical Physiology and Histology' in the Faculty of Science until 'Zoology and Animal Biology' emerged as a department in the Faculty of Science in 1901.   This department was incorporated into the new School of Biological Studies in 1964 that also comprised the departments of 'Biochemistry', 'Biophysics', 'Botany' and 'Physiology'. This prevailed until the merger of King's, Chelsea College and Queen Elizabeth College in 1985, when 'Zoology and Animal Biology' was absorbed within an enlarged 'Department of Biology'.  The latter was part of the Faculty of Life Sciences, and, from 1991, successively part of the Biosphere and Life Sciences Divisions of the 'School of Life, Basic Medical and Health Sciences'. Since 1998 it has been part of the Division of Life Sciences in the School of Health and Life Sciences.

The absorption of zoology into biology requires some explanation.  Beginning with the first discoveries of microscopy, the cell theory of biological organization emerged expressing the idea that plant and animal cells have many structures in common and are, to some degree, autonomous vital units. Just how much autonomy cells possess was a matter of serious debate in the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. The idea of cell autonomy was most strikingly expressed in the "theory of the cell state," an idea based upon the metaphorical conception of higher plants and animals as social colonies of cells.  The concept of biology in its modern sense was propounded independently by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur) and Lamarck (Hydrogologie). The word had been coined in 1800 by Karl Friedrich Burdach. Ultimately, beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, the metaphor of the cell as an autonomous citizen within a larger social body lost its allure.  Biochemical and physiological investigations began to displace morphological and evolutionary considerations of organisms and cells in both zoology and botany. After the Second World War, when biochemistry matured as a professional discipline, another metaphor came to dominate, one more suited to particular types of interdisciplinary questions being pursued by a new breed of cross-subject investigators, who described the cell as a "chemical factory".

Modern biology is a broad church and the most wide-ranging of all the sciences. The subject goes from the chemistry of the cell to the ecology of hunter-gatherers, from mammoth fossils to the causes of human mental depression, and from butterfly taxonomy to the treatment of cancer by gene therapy.   Historically, biology was forged in an academic battleground centred on the unity of all life forms at the level of cell structure and the fundamental biochemical reactions that sustain it.  From the early 1950s research into the unity of life at the cellular and biochemical levels was the cutting edge of the life sciences and molecular unity was reinforced by the discovery of the significance of DNA as life's universal chemical blueprint.  In the same period, the concepts of ecology and animal behaviour also provided new principles that unify life forms as diverse as bacteria and human societies within the theory of evolution.  The subject of biology has expanded to include all of this knowledge and thereby is able to provide unifying principles to cross the old academic boundaries that separated plants, animals and microbes. 

However, the time available to teach undergraduates has not increased so that inevitably there is less space in the curriculum for what Stephen Gould called old-fashioned knowledge of organic diversity.  For those wishing to specialise, zoology, botany and microbiology have now almost disappeared from academic institutions and been replaced by 'biology' with its many flavours.  Within the few remaining zoology departments the emphasis is on the ecological and behavioural dimensions of animals, and applications of their cell biology and biochemistry to medicine, agriculture and wildlife conservation.

My own pathway to zoology opened after a random collision with a book in my school library entitled 'Attending marvels: a Patagonian Journal'.  This was the account by George Gaylord Simpson of his travel adventures during a year of fossil collecting in South America in 1930-31.  He went to Patagonia at the age of 28 to study fossils of peculiar species never found on any other continent. Readers with and without an interest in vertebrate palaeontology can enjoy his report on the trip because of the author's humour, a keen interest in unfossilized, or only partially fossilized, human nature, and a good narrative style, as well as a gift for getting into exciting situations. Take for example this excerpt recounting his early work in Patagonia:

"The fossil hunter does not kill; he resurrects. And the result of his sport is to add to the sum of human pleasure and to the treasures of human knowledge."

He was happy to spend all his intellectual efforts on animals and mammals in particular because:

“...despite abundant differences in detail the principles of plant evolution are generally the same as those of animal evolution.  Man is an animal, so that animal evolution is usually more interesting to him and is also more likely to have meaning for him and to elucidate his place in the cosmos.  For the same reasons, discussion of the meaning of evolution for man may properly emphasise the vertebrates among animals and the mammals among vertebrates”

A very important influence on my choice of a career in science was Charles Kingsley's book, "Madam How and Lady Why." Although I did not know it at the time, this was also a strong influence in turning the young George Simpson towards science.

'To that remarkable work I can trace very definitely and without doubt, not only my first understanding, however dim then, of the scientific method and, more distinctly but equally surely, the vague beginnings of a scientific philosophy'.

Kingsley wrote" Water Babies" and especially "Madam How and Lady Why" to encourage children to use their own eyes and reason to give understanding and meaning to the world around them.

However, I have to say I was seduced from zoology to biochemistry by another newer publication, which sat on the same shelf as Simpson, 'An Introduction to Biochemistry', by William Robert Fearon, which was published in 1946.   Fearon's message was that future prizes lay with the discovery of how energy was captured and used by cells.   So it turned out that I eventually arrived in the laboratory of the Nobel Laureate, Hans Krebs, in Oxford, where I joined his team to work on the comparative biochemistry of oxidative metabolism.

I did eventually reach the animals of academe when I was appointed to the Chair of Zoology in the University of Wales at Cardiff.  It is a significant historical marker that the reference to anatomy had been quietly dropped from the department's previous title of 'zoology and comparative anatomy'.  After I gave up the headship of the department in the 1980s it was merged with Applied Biology, Botany and Microbiology into a School of Biological Sciences.  What follows is my inaugural lecture entitled 'The Scope of Zoology', in which I set out the importance of zoology as the subject I was responsible for in 1969.