Science usually works best when it is dealing with the unknown or the unexpected. Sometimes, though, a scientist finds himself in the odd position of having to prove the obvious. Harry Harlow was just such a scientist: he had to prove the existence of love. When Harlow was training as a psychologist in the 1920S his subject appeared to have lost its bearings. A fierce desire to purge the field of subjectivity and anecdote, replacing them with controlled and repeatable experiments, had produced a monster that arrogantly denied meaning to what could not be quantified, rather than recognising the limits of its techniques. This simplified behaviourist approach found that animals such as rats and pigeons were good analogues ("models", in the jargon) of humans―with the added advantage that they did not have human rights to constrain the experimenters. Oddly enough, many of these same psychologists also persisted with the quasi-religious belief that there exists an unbridgeable intellectual and emotional distinction between man and other animals.
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