Beauty or Statistics: Practice and Science in Dutch Livestock Breeding, 1900-2000 - Hardcover

Theunissen, Bert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1487507003 ISBN 13: 9781487507008

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2020

Synopsis

In the 1970s, scientists claimed that farm animal breeding was finally evolving from an art into a science. In their view, the switch to scientific breeding was as inevitable as the ongoing process of agricultural modernization. However, the art-to-science scenario is too simplistic to do justice to the complex dynamic that characterized the transformation of the field.

The livestock breeds that take centre stage in this book – dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, sheep, and horses – were products of the twentieth century. The methods used by breeders to improve their animals, however, were much older. Tracing the history of practical stockbreeding, the role of Mendelism in scientific breeding, and the emergence of quantitative genetics, Beauty or Statistics shows that the story of the scientific modernization of livestock breeding can be more fruitfully analysed from the perspective of changing cultures of breeding, taking practical, commercial, normative, and aesthetic considerations into account.

About this title

About the Author

Bert Theunissen is the director of the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, and the Chair of the History of Science Program at Utrecht University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487507003
• ISBN 13: 9781487507008
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288