Dissecting animals in biology class is a “gateway drug” to school shootings?

I was perusing the internet while having dinner tonight and I stumbled on this article. It's titled "why dissecting a frog explains nothing about life" and, for obvious reasons, it caught my eye. I was expecting . . ., what? I'm not sure. What I certainly was not expecting was an offensive piece of anti-intellectualism dressed up as concern for our fellow man.

The author, a self-admitted “O-level science dropout” was spurred to write after assisting his son with his biology homework. This assistance seems to have sent the author down a path of reverie that turned to nightmare as he was reminded of the horrors of his own forays into biology so many years ago. To him, biology was all about “the elevation of biological cogs and springs over any sense of a living whole” and only learned that “it was opposed not to the error of sentimentality, as such, but to feeling itself”. Those do not sound like great biology lessons.

The exemplar par excellence for this mechanistic view of biology was the frog dissection, which he found “empty and unsatisfying”, and animal reduced to parts without that spark of life that makes it truly ‘be’.

So far, so inoffensive. But what is offensive is how the author takes this and runs with it, so far into the realms of tastelessness and, frankly, ignorance, that it’s hard to see how anyone thought this piece was fit for publication. For, you see, the author somehow manages to conflate dissecting animals in an educational setting, for educational purposes, with animal cruelty and then cites a statistic that shows that people who go on to commit atrocious crimes such as mass shootings often begin their acts of violence with episodes of animal cruelty. He is, in essence, saying that dissections are a ‘gateway drug’ to mass violence.

What is most offensive is that there is an inkling of a point in the beginning of the piece, but the author throws it all away with some wild accusation that seems to claim that anyone interested in how animals work are just murderers-in-waiting. The point that twinkles dimly amidst the ignorance is that reductionism has its flaws. Reductionism isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of science, however much some may think, or wish, it was. Emergent properties abound, particularly in biology, and to think that you can understand the ecosystem of a coral reef, for example, by simply dissecting its component parts is naïve in the extreme. But, without understanding the inner workings of those organisms, any attempt at understanding that ecosystem is equally flawed.

So, why do we dissect animals? I will use an analogy I think the author may, as a poet, recognise, and in keeping with his article, I too will do so with a reminiscence from my school days.

I was a GCSE-level English Literature dropout. I was forced to spend 2 years reading and dissecting texts and poems; trying to find allusions, alliterations, metaphors and similes in the writings in order to try and work out what the author was trying to convey. “But poems aren’t supposed to be dissected line by line, word by word!” I cried. “They’re meant to be read and the reader is meant to feel the emotion sweeping over them. Reading them in this cold and critical manner is removing all their life, all their soul!”

I still agree with that sentiment, all these years later. But I have also come to understand that in that dissection it was possible to get a greater sense of the intent of the poet or author. That by taking a piece of art apart and breaking it down into its constituent pieces it is possible to put it back together again with a new-found understanding of exactly why I was feeling the feelings I was feeling.

In the same way, dissections are not just about breaking an animal down into their constituent parts and leaving them as some lifeless, mechanical piles of viscera. They are also about seeing how those constituent parts work and fit together to work as a whole. How digestive systems differ depending on the diet, particularly in gut length. How reproductive methods vary between animals depending on whether they are internally or externally fertilised, and on how much investment the mother provides. How muscles and tendons power animals and allow them to be sprinters or marathon-runners, or couch potatoes who prefer to sit and wait for food to come to them. And that’s just as the most basic level. More detailed dissections can reveal a huge amount of information on evolutionary history and help us understand how animals are related to each other. But then, when we have that information, it is rarely left there. The information only finds its full potential when we pull back and look, once again, at the animal as a whole. We can now look at how it functions in its environment with greater understanding. We can understand how behaviour is shaped by their anatomy, how their jaws and digestive systems determine what food they can capture, how their reproduction determines how they interact with other members of their own species, how their muscle types determine their hunting strategy. Admittedly, we can work out some of this just from observation of living organisms but to truly understand we need to get inside.

In the same way that dissecting literature can help us illuminate a deeper meaning, dissecting animals helps us to more fully understand how they function. In the same way that reading a poem one word at a time, without the memory of the preceding word or the anticipation of the next renders the poem meaningless, examining each organ of an animal without reference to the others renders our understanding incomplete. However, in just the same way that by focusing, in turn, on each word and understanding why the author or poet chose that word instead of another we can get a deeper understanding of that piece of art, so too by studying each organ, each tissue, we can get a deeper understanding of that animal and how it lives the way it does.

And in neither case does gaining satisfaction from this endeavour lead to mass murder.