Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat: Scenes From the Living Laboratory

  • Rom Harré
Oxford University Press: 2009. 288 pp. £16.99, $34.95 9780199238569 | ISBN: 978-0-1992-3856-9

This charming book is entertaining, thought-provoking and frustrating. It is worth reading for all three of those reactions.

Written by the distinguished philosopher Rom Harré, Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat is based on the premise that just as scientists interrogate the real world with inanimate equipment such as flasks, telescopes and DNA sequencers, we also do so with animate organisms or their parts. Thus, dogs were the apparatus Ivan Pavlov used to study conditioned responses, Galapagos finches the devices used by Peter and Rosemary Grant to study natural selection, and peas and flies the tools used by Gregor Mendel and Theodosius Dobzhansky, respectively, to elucidate genetics. The use of organic equipment extends beyond the biological sciences: for a time, frogs' legs and canaries were more sensitive detectors of electricity and carbon monoxide than any machine, and we still explore Earth's climatic history using long-departed organisms. Harré romps through five centuries of vignettes, asking who used these organic tools, why and to what end.

And it is an entertaining romp, partly because it is so well written, and partly because the animals and plants involved generate great stories. Some stories are lovely, such as William Buckland's conclusion from cave bones that the UK county of Yorkshire was tropical before Noah's flood. Some are sad, such as the experiments on filial love and maternal separation in monkeys by Harry Harlow, studies that caused great distress to the animals involved, and that have not stood the test of time. And some are horror stories — including one of the most gripping and succinct summaries of the Lysenko fiasco in Soviet genetics I have read. The scientific questions that lie behind Harré's stories are often startling; for instance, what are the psychological underpinnings of those who commit genocide? The experimental ingenuity of scientists is sometimes breathtaking, such as Stephen Hales' determination of blood pressure using wax, brass pipes, glass tubes and expiring horses. Despite the brevity of each case study, the scientists emerge as real people, with varying degrees of brilliance and interpersonal skills. As a lucid illustration of the messy, chaotic and glorious professional world we scientists have always inhabited, this book is great.

Yet the book is more thought-provoking than a simple storytelling exercise. It is organized not as a history, nor by scientific subject, but by the principles of the philosophy of science. Chapters are devoted to organisms as detecting and measuring devices, and as tools for exploration, for testing hypotheses and for modelling reality. This organization generates an easily digested introduction to many of the key concepts of the philosophy of science. It demonstrates vividly that there is no single way of doing science; philosophers of science are hard pressed to describe what is going on, let alone prescribe what we ought to be doing.

There is another layer too. Harré is obviously troubled by the ethical dilemmas associated with the use of live organisms in science. He argues, quite rightly, that it makes no sense to hold strong views on animal experimentation without having a sound understanding of how science works, of how and why animals have been used, and the unpredictable gains that can result. The book does a terrific job of generating that understanding. Even the inclusion of examples that, at first glance, have little to do with animal experimentation — plants, worms on mounds of methane ice, and virtual animals such as the titular cat and Richard Dawkins' biomorphs — bring into sharp focus issues that are central to the political debate. Harré discusses the merits of inanimate and non-sentient alternatives, and the unpredictable value of generalizing from model organisms.

This book should be compulsory reading for activists who man the barricades, throw the bombs or step up to the microphone. As Harré says, “Only when we have a clear idea of what has been done by whom and for what purpose can we take up the pressing moral questions that must arise.”

But then comes frustration. Having provided that “clear idea”, Harré doesn't take up the pressing moral questions. He concludes that there are three dimensions to argue about: the extent to which gaining scientific knowledge is an absolute good, the extent to which other living things have inalienable rights, and the extent to which we ascribe mental lives to other things. But then he dodges the bullet, saying “I leave the working out of moral arguments to others more qualified than I am to reach just and ethically sound conclusions”. How much more qualified than Harré can you get?

It is easy to feel that Harré has interesting views that he has not shared. He mentions early on that he has “serious reservations about many projects in which animals have been involved”. He hints in two places that experimenting with plants has implications for the animal-experimentation debate. He even says there may be moral issues about working with virtual organisms. But on none of these does he expand.

Could it be that with animal experimentation, things are so muddy, so difficult, that even a professional philosopher, immersed in the topic and its context, is unable to come to a logically justifiable position? Are the moral issues raised by the scientific use of animals different from those raised by, say, slavery, abortion, euthanasia or the death penalty? They could well be. For the most part, we cannot tell in advance which areas of scientific knowledge are worth knowing. Nor, for the interesting cases, can we tell whether our instrumentation — animate or inanimate — is up to the game. I think the debate on animal experiments is with us for eternity.