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

Michel Anctil

ISBN 10: 0228010535 / ISBN 13: 9780228010531

Published by McGill-Queen s University Press, 2022

2022. Hardcover. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9780228010531

Synopsis:

Through the ages natural historians have puzzled over how animals work, wavering between a vitalist belief in a soul animating bodily functions and a mechanistic outlook in which animal body parts are seen as pieces of organic machinery.

Animal as Machine explores the life, work, and ideas of scientists who, branding themselves as physiologists, subscribed to mechanistic concepts to explain how animals acquire and process food, breathe, circulate their blood, and sense their environment. As medical physiology thrived in the nineteenth century, zoologists struggled to forge their own distinctive physiology predicated on understanding animal functions in a context of environmental adaptation and evolutionary forces. Physiological schools with distinct emphases that shaped their outlook sprang up around the world. Dividing their time between fieldwork in marine stations and laboratory experimentation, animal physiologists stood in awe of the diversity and ingenuity of the functional strategies by which animals survived.

Animal as Machine 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.

About the Author: Michel Anctil is honorary professor of biology at Université de Montréal and author of Dawn of the Neuron: The Early Struggles to Trace the Origin of Nervous Systems and Luminous Creatures: The History and Science of Light Production in Living Organisms.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Animal as Machine: The Quest to Understand ...
Publisher: McGill-Queen s University Press
Publication Date: 2022
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: New