Wild types in genetics are specialised strains of laboratory experimental organism which principally serve as standards against which variation is measured. As selectively inbred lineages highly isolated from ancestral wild populations, there appears to be little wild or typical about them. I will nonetheless argue that they have historically been successfully used as stand-ins for nature, allowing knowledge produced in the laboratory to be extrapolated to the natural world. In this paper, I will explore the 19th century origins of the wild type concept, the theoretical and experimental innovations which allowed concepts and organisms to move from wild nature to laboratory domestication c. 1900 (resulting in the production of standardised lab strains), and the conflict among early geneticists between interactionist and atomist accounts of wild type, which would eventually lead to the conceptual disintegration of wild types and the triumph of genocentrism and population genetics. I conclude by discussing how the strategy of using wild type strains to represent nature in the lab has nonetheless survived the downfall of the wild type concept and continues to provide, significant limitations acknowledged, an epistemically productive means of investigating heredity and evolutionary variation.
This paper explores how, at the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection, the anaesthetised animal was construed as a boundary object around which “cooperation without consensus” (Star, in: Esterbrook (ed) Computer supported cooperative work: cooperation or conflict? Springer, London, 1993) could form, serving the interests of both scientists and animals. Advocates of anaesthesia presented it as benevolently intervening between the scientific agent and animal patient. Such articulations of ‘ethical’ vivisection through anaesthesia were then mandated in the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, and thus have had significant downstream effects on the regulation of laboratory animals in Britain and beyond. Constructing this ‘consensus’ around the anaesthetised animal, however, required first excluding abolitionists and inhumane scientists, and secondly limiting the interests of experimental animals to the avoidance of pain through anaesthesia and euthanasia, thereby circumventing the issue of their possible interest in future life. This consensus also served to secure the interests of vivisecting scientists and to limit the influence of public opinion in the laboratory to administrative procedure and scheduled inspection. The focus on anaesthesia was connected with discussions of what supporting infrastructures were required to ensure proper ethical procedure was carried out by scientists. In contrast to the much studied polarisation in British society between pro- and antivivisectionists after 1876, we understand the 1875 Commission as a conflict amongst scientists themselves, while also being an intra-class conflict amongst the ruling class (French in Antivivisection and medical science in Victorian society, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975).
Can a one-ounce laboratory mouse with a brain that can fit in a teaspoon really act as a model for the complex psychiatric disorders of its far larger and more neurologically complex mammalian relative, Homo sapiens? And does the heritability of laboratory animal behaviours such as a preference for avoiding the open arms of an elevated maze actually tell us anything about the influence of genetics on human medical conditions such as anxiety? Questions like these have long been raised by social scientists regarding animal behaviour genetics, and a common response has been to critically characterise such modelling approaches as deeply reductionist. Against this interpretation, Nicole Nelson strives to show, in this enlightening and lively book, that animal behaviour geneticists are fully aware of the difficulties of drawing analogies between human and animal behaviour and take complexity very seriously.
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