If you have ever looked at a dog waiting to go for a walk and thought there was something age-old and almost human about his sad expression, you’re not alone; Charles Darwin did exactly the same. But Darwin didn’t just stop at feeling that there was some connection between humans and dogs. English gentleman naturalist, great pioneer of the theory of evolution and incurable dog-lover, Darwin used his much-loved dogs as evidence in his continuing argument that all animals including human beings, descended from one common ancestor. From his fondly written letters home enquiring after the health of family pets to his profound scientific consideration of the ancestry of the domesticated dog, Emma Townshend looks at Darwin’s life and work from a uniquely canine perspective.

Do dogs belong with humans? Scientific accounts of dogs' 'species story,' in which contemporary dog-human relations are naturalised with reference to dogs' evolutionary becoming, suggest that they do. Dog politics dissects this story. This book offers a rich empirical analysis and critique of the development and consolidation of dogs' species story in science, asking what evidence exists to support it, and what practical consequences, for dogs, follow from it. It explores how this story is woven into broader scientific shifts in understandings of species, animals, and animal behaviours, and how such shifts were informed by and informed transformative political events, including slavery and colonialism, the Second World War and its aftermath, and the emergence of anti-racist movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book pays particular attention to how species-thinking bears on 'race,' racism, and individuals.

Creative storytelling is the beating heart of Darwin's science. All of Darwin's writings drew on information gleaned from a worldwide network of scientific research and correspondence, but they hinge on moments in which Darwin asks his reader to imagine how specific patterns came to be over time, spinning yarns filled with protagonists and antagonists, crises, triumphs, and tragedies. His fictions also forged striking new possibilities for the interpretation of human societies and their relation to natural environments. This volume gathers an international roster of scholars to ask what Darwin's writing offers future of literary scholarship and critical theory, as well as allied fields like history, art history, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, the history of race, aesthetics, and ethics. It speaks to anyone interested in the impact of Darwin on the humanities, including literary scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers interested in Darwin's continuing influence.

Man’s best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoors—dogs matter to us because we love them. But is that all there is to the canine’s good-natured voracity and affectionate dependency? Mark Alizart dispenses with the well-worn clichés concerning dogs and their masters, seeing them not as submissive pets but rather as unexpected life coaches, ready to teach us the elusive recipes for contentment and joy. Dogs have faced their fate in life with a certain detachment that is not easy to understand. Unlike other animals in a similar situation, they have not become hardened, nor have they let themselves die a little inside. On the contrary, they seem to have softened. This book is devoted to understanding this miracle, the miracle of the joy of dogs – to understanding it and, if at all possible, to learning how it’s done. Weaving elegantly and eruditely between historical myth and pop-culture anecdote, between the peculiar views of philosophers and the even more bizarre findings of science, Alizart offers us a surprising new portrait of the dog as thinker—a thinker who may perhaps know the true secret of our humanity.

Tin Tin’s Snowy, Odysseus’s Argos, Darwin’s Polly, Mary Queen of Scots’s 22 lap-dogs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Flush... Behind every great man or woman is a dog. A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs is a rich compendium of the world’s most significant and beloved dogs. Embracing the intriguing and the provocative, the essential and the trivial, Peter J. Conradi forays into history, literature and personal anecdotes to unearth a treasure trove of canine characters. Discover the stories behind Karl Marx's and his daughter's Dogberry Club; the lapdogs who were secreted in first-class cabins on the Titanic and how they survived; Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Bobby who stayed by his master’s grave for 14 years; and the one undisputed fact about Shakespeare – his singular dislike for dogs. A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs is a wonderful and witty homage to man’s most faithful friend.

Biophilia—the love of life—encompasses the drive to survive, a sense of kinship with all life-forms, and an instinct for beauty. In this unconventional book, Kay Harel uses biophilia as a lens to explore Charles Darwin’s life and thought in deeply original ways. In a set of interrelated essays, she considers how the love of life enabled him to see otherwise unseen evolutionary truths. Harel traces the influence of biophilia on Darwin’s views of dogs, facts, thought, emotion, and beauty, informed by little-known material from his private notebooks. She argues that much of what Darwin described, envisioned, and felt was biophilia in action. Closing the book is a profile of Darwin’s marriage to Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a woman gifted in music and medicine who shared her husband’s love of life. Harel’s meditative, playful, and lyrical musings draw on the tools of varied disciplines—aesthetics, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, history of science, philosophy, psychiatry, and more—while remaining unbounded by any particular one. Taking unexpected paths to recast a figure we thought we knew, this book offers readers a different Darwin: a man full of love, joy, awe, humility, curiosity, and a zest for living.

A celebration of dogs, the scientists who've lived alongside them, and how canines have been key to advancements in science for the betterment of all species. Almost everywhere there are humans on planet Earth, there are dogs. But what do dogs know and understand of the world? Do their emotions feel like our own? Do they love like we do? What do they think of us? Since our alliance first began on the hunt and on the farm, our relationship with dogs has evolved considerably. And with domestic dog population rising twenty per cent in the last decade alone, it is a bond that will continue to evolve. In order to gauge where our relationship with dogs goes from here, author and zoologist Jules Howard takes a look at the historical paths we have trod together, and at the many scientists before him who turned their analytic eye on their own four-legged companions. Charles Darwin and his contemporaries toyed with dog sign language and made special puzzle boxes and elaborate sniff tests using old socks. Later, the same questions drove Pavlov and Pasteur to unspeakable cruelty in their search for knowledge. Since then, leagues of psychologists and animal behaviourists have built upon the study of dogs and their much-improved methods have fetched increasingly important results: dogs have episodic memory similar to ours; they recognise themselves as individuals; and, in addition to their expert sense of smell, dogs’ noses can even detect thermal radiation. With the help of vets, ethologists, neurologists, historians and, naturally, his own dogs, Wonderdog reveals the study of dogs to be key in the advancement of compassion in scientific research, and crucial to making life on Earth better for all species.