In Memoriam

Toward Genuine Rodent Welfare: Response to Reviewer Comments

“…Blanchard (2010/this issue) defends our infliction of harms to animals in laboratories by appealing to the harsh cruelties of living in the wild. As I argue in a forthcoming book (Balcombe, in press), popular perceptions of "nature red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson, 1850) ignore rewards intrinsic to a free life, even one lived short, and seek to absolve us of any guilt for choosing to cause animal suffering. The argument from cruel nature is also disingenuous for implying that rodent researchers have the animals' best interests at heart when their protocols usually cause harm and end in death.…”

Against finality: Darwin, Mill and the end of essentialism

“…He knows, applying a Malthusian framework, that the individual is discarded by the processes of natural selection, ‘As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive’ . Tennyson's formulation of nature – ‘So careful of the type she seems,/ So careless of the single life’ – expressed this anxiety. Individuals could – and did – go to the wall.…”

Developmental needs and early childhood education: evolutionary, my dear Watson

“…Throughout The Origin of Species , Darwin writes of this relationship as key to whether the organism survives or becomes extinct, frequently describing the relationship in terms of collaboration and reciprocity. This may be surprising to people who associate evolutionary theory with the man who has become stereotyped as the advocate of 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' (Tennyson, 1850), and of Social Darwinism. But Darwin was no Social Darwinist (a term of Herbert Spencer's).…”