A Victorian extinction

Alfred Newton and the evolution of animal protection

Bibliographic Data

ID8394698
AuthorsHenry M Cowles (0000-0002-2491-497X, Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume46
Issue4
Pages695-714
Publication date2013-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal for the History of Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0874 • E-ISSN: 1474-001X
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0007087412000027
OpenAlexW2324276588
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited34

The modern concept of extinction emerged in the Victorian period, though its chief proponent is seldom remembered today. Alfred Newton, for four decades the professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge, was an expert on rare and extinct birds as well as on what he called ‘the exterminating process'. Combining traditional comparative morphology with Darwinian natural selection, Newton developed a particular sense of extinction that helped to shape contemporary, and subsequent, animal protection. Because he understood extinction as a process to be studied scientifically, and because he made that, rather than animal cruelty, the focus of animal protection, Newton provides an important window onto the relationship between science and sentiment in this period. Newton's efforts to bring the two into line around the issue of human-caused extinction reveal an important moment in which the boundaries between science and sentiment, and between those who did and those who did not have the authority to speak for nature, were up for grabs

Aesthetics · Animal ethics · Biology · Criminology · Cruelty · Darwinism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Extinction (optical mineralogy · Period (music · Sociology · Zoology · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History of Science and Natural History · Paleontology · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub