ya, I did some quick search on the web:

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the father of modern philosophy, believed that humans have two components: the body and the mind (soul). Most of what we do can be explained by unthinking responses, or passions to our environment. Descartes proposed that animals, lacking mind, act and interact through passions only. They are, in short, organic automata (machines), “much more splendid than artificial ones,” but machines nonetheless.

Descartes and his followers performed experiments in which they nailed animals by their paws onto boards and cut them open to reveal their beating hearts. They burned, scalded, and mutilated animals in every conceivable manner. When the animals reacted as though they were suffering pain, Descartes dismissed the reaction as no different from the sound of a machine that was functioning improperly. A crying dog, Descartes maintained, is no different from a whining gear that needs oil.

360 years later, Rene Descartes still exerts influence. While most contemporary scientists concede that animals can feel pain, their pain, so it is argued, is not quite like ours. Thus, vivisection continues. Yet clearly, all humans do not suffer in exactly the same way; I can never truly know what pain feels like to you. I can intuit by virtue of a like anatomy (nociceptors, spinal cord, brain), but this biological similarity is precisely why we experiment on animals in the first place. In the end, there is no escaping this uncomfortable truth: the only reason we cut up defenseless animals and not intellectually-similar human beings (small children, senile seniors, mentally-enfeebled) in the pursuit of scientific progress is that they do not belong to our species. And speciesism is as irrational as racism and sexism. Rene Descartes’ philosophy is an anachronism that should be buried in an unenlightened past.


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The arguments of authority were and are quite common, unfortunately. Aristotle said that the planets are perfect spheres, and this was true for the next 1800 years. When Galileo showed that the Moon's surface was irregular (the moon is a "planet" in classical astronomy) there were many who said he was wrong because it was contrary to Aristotle. It was no use to show images in your telescope, make drawings, bringing the moon pulling with a rope and rub it on the nose of the citizen: Aristotle had not said that its surface was flat? Well then it is flat, what the hell! This reminds me of the famous phrase "if the facts do not fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts ..."

So when you kill a pig or a dog, even if he cries, bud, try desperately to escape, if squirm in pain as you scream and stabs him horribly until the last breath of life was fading, that does not mean that he feels pain, suffering or has any other emotion ... Why? However, because Descartes said so, that nonhuman animals (a group clearly paraphyletic!) Are just automatons, devoid of any internal mental state. And that's it!

This nonsense did not come Cartesian join the Catholic and Jewish view that nonhuman animals are only movable property, public or private property, devoid of "soul" and subject to any treatment that humans want to dismiss them. In fact, this nonsense is born into this Cartesian view Catholic and Jewish, as is easy to see.

Exploring the internal mental states of bees cows, cognitive ethology is becoming increasingly robust.

And so for the next four centuries, the authority Cartesian hung (would have stopped hovering?) On all scientific research on all of biology, zoology over all, on the whole ethology. I've heard several times, my students, that "man is the only rational animal." Well, I attribute this kind of opinion over the Christian tradition that Descartes. However, I've heard my colleagues in academia, and no fewer than a dozen times, saying "animals (nonhuman) have no emotion", "animals have no rationality", "animals do not feel pain", explicitly using the name Descartes as an argument of authority. I guess these guys are able to do vivissecções without anesthesia, because, since animals do not feel pain?

The cognitive ethology, a branch of ethology, in short, seeks to study the internal mental states of animals, is not exactly a new science, though only about 30 or 40 years (for those who do not know, I recommend the books of disclosure scientific Mark Bekoff and Colin Allen, especially "Species of mind"). However, I have the impression that cognitive ethology is gaining traction, producing more papers and being taken increasingly seriously in the academic world. I may be wrong, but I bet some chips that I'm not.

This therefore is the reason for this brief note: draw attention to the recent progress in an area of biology extremely interesting and complex. Bees with emotional states, cows that demonstrate understanding of their social structure, demonstrations of affection in chickens, whales that give names to each other ... The last few years have been quite prolific for cognitive ethology, and the trend is that it becomes increasingly robust and increasingly important. That, just as Galileo and his telescope, the cognitive ethology show that an argument from authority can not override the facts and scientific analysis.

When Darwin published "Origin," began the slow but inevitable death of this concept is detrimental to the scala naturae. Likewise, I hope that the maturation of cognitive ethology begin the slow death of this nonsense Cartesian, primarily in academia, and then in society as a whole.

Last edited by Mithus; 03/22/12 05:36 PM.
Animal Ethics: "I tremble for my species when I reflect that god is just." Thomas Jefferson.
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