I’ve taught many different university courses, first as a biology graduate student, then as a professor: freshmen and capstone, majors and non-majors, focused and general, biology and interdisciplinary. Pound for pound, it was the non-majors general biology classes that taught me the most about what people “out there” know, how they think the world works, and what order and type of information opens up the discussion. I loved these classes, because the students were unswervingly honest: screw up some ideas, or give an unfair or poorly conceived test, and you found out about it in no uncertain terms, and not months later in an evaluation, either. But if you show that you’re exacting but fair, and bring the biology into their lives—not as spectacle, but as a genuine issue—then they show up early, arrive waving something they’ve looked up, stay late, make friends with one another, and study diligently.
They also taught me the most about the limitations of my course material: what parts were hand waving, or seemed like it, and what gaps were obvious to them although invisible to me and my colleagues. I made it my professional business to keep refining the presentation and the content for maximum clarity, to keep reorganizing the material for maximum impact, and to keep redesigning the testing methods for maximum reward for learning. I also tried many ways to open the course—what exercise or project should kick it off, and what to say. My operating principle, the most successful as it turned out, was brutal honesty to set up a real social contract:
The administrators call this a “requirement.” I do not actually know if they laugh about the tuition they’re getting from you, but they do wear tassel loafers and have much nicer offices than anyone I know at this school. I can tell you, they are not my people, and I do not work for them. I work for one guy down the hall, the department head. I teach this class because I think it’s important. I don’t think the tuition is “extra” or a scam, and I’ll tell you why, or I hope to show you why as we go along.
But I know I can’t ask you to believe that, not right now. Professors tell you all kinds of things on the first day and unless something has changed, well, I don’t remember a lot of my old profs really making good on it. I’m saying that you are right to ask, how is this worth my time? Why do I have to do this? I’m also saying that I can’t answer it unless you meet me—let’s say, a third of the way. Attend class, do some stuff, and see what makes sense—talk about what doesn’t, ask some questions, and in a few weeks, see what you think. Really be here, though, don’t wander in with your head somewhere else. I’ll be doing the same, because although I do have a schedule of topics, there’s some flexibility, and I’ll always say it exactly as I think you, no one else, right here this term, will get the most out of it based on what’s happened so far.
Here are some mechanics to help us both with this.
•I don’t assign discussion points, subjective points, whatever you want to call them. Your grade comes right out of your scores. That’s because I don’t trust myself, or anyone, not to abuse those points for students I like. This way, you can raise questions, you can be wrong, you can disagree with me, or you can simply keep to yourself if you want, and there’s not a thing I can do to you in terms of your grade. It keeps that safe.
•I don’t take attendance or apply it to your grade. You’re all grown-ups. I know most of you work, like I did in college. You have to decide how to trade off your time and your obligations. So you know, we’ll have graded work almost every day, and I don’t do “ten percent off” or make-ups. If something truly medical or outrageous is involved, it’s pro-rated, and that’s all. Miss one without one of those situations listed in your syllabus, and it’s a zero—but the good news is, no extra points are coming off.
At about this point, the students are surprised, and I can see them thinking, “This guy might actually be all right.” That’s when I tell them something biologically amazing, not just a cool detail from a nature special, but a point they never dreamed of, which makes them think back on their experience and sense their own bodies differently. It could be any of a dozen things, from the blood pooling in their circulatory system because they’re been sitting too long, to what in the world is actually in that cup of legal psychoactive drug I’m drinking in front of them and what it’s doing to my brain, or anything else immediate, experiential, and familiar. Halfway through the explanation, I ask, “Do you want to know?” And the tigerish enthusiasm that responds lets me know, this term, this class, we’re going to make it.
I’ve written this book in the language I developed in these classes. It’s still a professor voice, although I hope only the good parts: intellectual ruthlessness, attention to the listener’s starting position, and the biologist’s typical and possibly charming social shortcomings. But it’s also a fellow learner’s voice, ready to be surprised by what the other humans might say. I tell every classroom of students at the beginning of a course that they are not intellectual subordinates, that although they may well be informed and provoked in a good way, they don’t have to agree with me in order to pass, or to make me feel important. I learned as a student myself—and carried it into my teaching—that instruction is not about rank, it’s about showing you can add value and about building trust.
Here, I’d like to reduce the implicit authority of writing a book as far as I can. My own history—teacher, evolutionary biologist, reader of speculative fiction, political activist, animal care committee member, small-press game publisher, father and husband, and more—produce a certain lived expertise, perhaps a good one for this project. I entered my studies in an exciting period for evolutionary thinking, and in retrospective, had remarkable luck in meeting and working with some notable individuals. Instead of a single mentor and specialty, I learned techniques from the fragments of DNA—back when gel kits were built in the lab—to hands-on work with both living and dead animals, to the hectares of open fields full of unsympathetic plants and creatures who bite. I had also been lucky to be trained in a broad range of liberal arts, with an eye toward history and toward the multiple ways a problem or idea is expressed in a historical moment; science to me is never merely testing a hypothesis, it’s a powerful debate in which this one study flares up briefly, and that debate neither came from nowhere nor exists in isolation from anywhere in society.
Two things stood out for me, beyond the technical science. The first was the role that we as scientists found, or made, toward those animals we held power over, and who would be so surprised as me to find myself in a position of authority toward other scientists as well—some pretty scary smart ones, too, with many thousands of animals in the picture. The second was teaching, which I love, the job that never goes sour or old, the wonderful blend of the familiar and reliable, combined with the new things I’d decided to bring to it this time and the new statements and thoughts a new room of students may bring. It’s added up: history, evolutionary theory, animal care, and the demand and excitement of finding whether it makes sense in the meeting of minds. One might say I’ve been training all my life to be able to talk about this single novel.
I’ve written from that expertise, as how could I not, but my point about the author’s voice stands: I do not assume the privilege to inflict the technical information upon a captive audience, or to use it to baffle others into silence. I do not claim to be an objective eye; I have lots of positions to present and a few irrepressible opinions that I hope to acknowledge as such. You’ll come to see my views on such things as metaphysical reality, religious outlooks, God, human beings, the mind, animal welfare and rights, and more. It would be amazing if you didn’t, and dishonest of me to slip them past as authoritative or obvious. I’ve tried to make it clear whether I’m explaining someone else’s view, representing current biological thought, or going off on my own. With any luck, we can find a unique contact between my argument and your own lived expertise.
Almost everything about this project, then, flies in the face of the accepted forms of writing science, history, and history of science. With respect to these many colleagues, love you as I may, I am not writing for you. I haven’t allied my text with specific camps within evolutionary biology, or among the current schools of ethics, or with one or another clump in the thickets of literary theory. I’m writing instead to people as I’ve met them through my students, who are generally willing to learn once they’re convinced the course design is a fair deal, and after some time, discover a new depth of astonishment and curiosity. Therefore I’m using a couple of pedagogical principles from those classroom as well: first, to put aside the ideal of complete coverage, preferring instead the “pump” model of inspiring students to do and learn things. I do not use the standard web of technical terms for such things as natural selection or metabolism, but instead the same language I’ve developed over the years in class, beginning with familiar and informal terms to lay a foundation for learning technical ones, introducing an important point as a secondary topic with a single interesting detail, to be presented more completely later. The key is to maintain accuracy, such that simplification strikes home rather than glosses anything over.
Similarly, the usual academic completism in referencing is not productive in this context. I’ve chosen references as doors to further reading, much as with handouts in a course, not as an exhaustive list of whatever anyone may ever have thought about a given topic, with the only exceptions being direct attribution for specific points.
The tone comes from my classroom as well, and although the grammar is probably considerably better in written form, it’s also true that impolite words may appear here and there.
Here’s what I say when I pull out an ominous-looking cardboard box. It’s one of the few times when I shift out of my ordinary sunny classroom demeanor.
A word on specimens and dissections. The animals you’ll be working with came from slaughterhouses, as in our culture we kill pigs in great numbers every day, and some of them are pregnant. We’ll be using late-term embryos, effectively functioning infants at the time of their death. Ordinarily they would be incinerated with the rest of their mothers’ viscera, but some have made their way here, as a detour, and when we are done, they will be similarly incinerated. Understand me well: these animals were in our power; their entire existence was subject to our control. Our use of them here is a sub-routine of their deaths in that context. Those deaths are our responsibility, both as a culture and here in this classroom with you. That use, then, is a serious matter to me. There will be no failure to attend carefully to everything they can teach us, nor especially any disrespect to their bodies. I will react to that as I would if these were the bodies of human infants donated to science education. Is that understood?
I also talk about what dissection is for. I tell them, this isn’t pro forma. It’s not a scavenger hunt in which they check off a list of things, pointing to them in the animal as they go.
We’re looking at something that can be seen and taught no other way—that the zillions of individually living cells don’t make a body without what’s called organ systems. They aren’t engineered. They aren’t “made.” They’re historical elaborations on moving stuff around the body in bulk, generating—effectively by accident—an interior environment, a place where the cells live, and as it’s happened, in combination, the larger organization we call the “organism,” the “individual,” or “you.” Your cells are alive, but you as such are not. “You” are, by definition, this maintained internal environment and the chemical and electronic interactions among these systems. You may think you’re looking at a pig’s guts, but your organ systems are the same as his or hers, and what they do is you, in a way that a single cell of yours could never be. You’re here to learn those systems today: their parts, yes, but also what substance each one moves around, from where to where, and what happens to it.
In class, the students work in pairs, and my rule is that every animal will be dissected, but that no student is absolutely required to touch the body. Squeamish people have to find willing partners. I enjoy that rule quietly, because that day or the next, I’m accustomed to seeing the formerly reluctant students right in there, gloves on, pointing to this and that, exemplifying active learning and peer teaching. Nearly all of them do that.
I’ve written a book to dissect a book, for very similar reasons that I include animal dissections in class. It’s more than simply taking it apart. It’s understanding what it does, and experiencing—I hope—specific shock about it. I think The Island of Doctor Moreau is an important book, maybe the most important I’ve read, and it just may be that I can lead this dissection right.
•Part I is about orienting toward the novel, or how one might approach it as a reader. All of the chapters in this part are historical in one way or another, but Chapter 1 is mainly about philosophical and emotional ways to categorize the words “human” and “animal,” and serves as the introduction for the book as a whole. Chapter 2 is mainly about the political and intellectual framing of the issues, and Chapter 3 is mainly about narrative presentations regarding science.
•Part II is about research using nonhuman animals, with Chapter 4 focusing on pain and animal welfare, and Chapter 5 on experimental design and animal rights. I disclose a bit about my own history in these areas, and provide some thoughts on Moreau’s ideas as they’d be tested today.
•Part III is about human and nonhuman identity, with Chapter 6 focusing on cognition and appearance, and Chapter 7 on species differences and social behavior. I focus on the changing views of the main characters of the novel and suggest that some of them aren’t the named humans.
•Part IV is about the presumed humanity of social institutions, with Chapter 8 focusing on religion and Chapter 9 on different aspects of violence. Chapter 10 presents some conclusions and questions about the impact on science, morality, and our understanding of society if the term “human” carried no intrinsic meaning beyond a common species designator.
Given all the history and science, many details and ideas will be pulled in, but I’ve tried to keep them from taking over. When all is said and done, I really just want to talk about this book as a story and its possible importance to ourselves, today. For instance, my interest in H. G. Wells as a historical person starts and stops with his writing it. His interpretation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1896) past that point, his essay “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process,” his views toward the future of humanity, his back-and-forth views on eugenics, his range of political positions, his personal life, and most of his other writings have no place in my argument, and I’m not explaining or judging them. I’m completely ignoring his psychology and intentions; you won’t find any “Wells means this” or “with this, Wells is saying.”
Although this position borrows a bit from the famous deconstructionist concept of “the death of the author,” I don’t wade in those waters very much either. My reading is more pedestrian, oriented toward the fictional content: who the characters are, where they are, what they do, and what happens to them, much in the same language as people ordinarily discuss stories they like. I like this one a lot, and what’s more, I think it’s genuinely valuable. Instead of deconstructing the plot, I prefer to value its structure and to engage with what fictionally happens. I dissect it in order to appreciate how it works and to enjoy it even more, not to strew its parts around.
To know this story well, history matters a great deal, and I aim to explain its relevance to the point of near madness, but not to dismiss the content of the story itself by embedding it safely long ago and far away. I’ve chosen what to include partly to provide context for what in the world some particular phrase in the novel is about, but mainly to bring in historical points that jump into the reader’s lap, as they are often surprising roots for the familiar issues of today. Classic historical completeness simply has to pay the price—instead of trying to get every historical event in there, I’ve tried instead simply not to be absurdly wrong about it. I’ve included some timelines to split the difference.
This was a lot harder to do when writing about evolutionary theory and specifically about Charles Darwin, who exerts a gravitational pull of fascination for many biologists. The hardest revisions always came from remembering that we already have many books on the subject and many biographies of the man, and that I was going off on a crazed tangent again, so wham, there went another unnecessary fifteen pages. Although plenty of technical information did stay, this isn’t a textbook; I’m teaching insofar as I’m opening a door to possible interest, but not by providing a mini-encyclopedia.
Some words simply haven’t lent themselves to easy definition, so will take on subtly different meanings depending on the immediate topic. I hope to avoid confusion in each case through context.
Most obviously, “human” and “animal” are under direct criticism as terms—that’s mainly what this book is about. Their use falls into these categories:
•As dichotomous components in an opposed pairing, recognizable as capitalized, as in the Man/Beast divide, or tagged with judgmental adjectives like “exalted Man, lowly Beast.” In all cases, this usage is the target of my disagreement with it, and indicates a position or point of view that I do not share, and in these passages, to which I am giving voice in order to critique.
•As quotes or vocabulary from the novel, which often expresses confusion or dogmatism on the part of the narrating or speaking character. I’ve provided a summary of such usage in Chapter 6.
•As standard informal scientific terminology, in the clumsy arrangement of “human” and “nonhuman animal,” which doesn’t manage to capture the reality. In Chapter 7, I discuss the difficulties of the terms “human animal” and “nonwolf animal,” with “wolf” being only a familiar species.
The Establishment, capitalized, was a mostly derogatory term during the nineteenth century, and the particular confluence of power it referred to was a real entity, so my usage usually applies specifically to that. However, it may creep in as a more general term, if the same phenomenon applies in a relevant way to a current topic.
The Progressive movement during the nineteenth century, or progressivism, is usually applied toward historical groups and people who used the word themselves, and I do not apply it to today’s political spectrum, except insofar as specific groups have chosen to do so.
Charles Darwin’s term “natural selection” has undergone both cultural and scientific changes since its coining over a century and a half ago. When referring to it as a historical term, I call it by its original name, “natural selection,” but when discussing it as a biological process, I merely call it “selection,” with the implication that nuances such as artificial, sexual, and others are present on a case-by-case basis.