An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Yong is a very well-regarded popular science writer. The genre of popular science aims to make scientific discourse accessible to readers who are interested in science but do not have a background in it. In An Immense World, Yong communicates a substantial amount of information regarding scientific research on animal sense perception.

In addition, he attempts to communicate this research through the framework of Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt and to make this theory of animal subjectivity accessible to a broad audience. This audience, while interested in animals’ lives, may not be used to approaching animals as full subjects. Uexkull himself wrote in A Foray into the Worlds of Animal and Humans (1934) of his frustration with “machine theorists” who view animals as machines rather than subjects or agents of their own lives and through whom “animals are made thereby into pure objects” (42).

Because Yong writes within a genre that attempts to distill science and make its research easily digestible, many of the practices of science that are in tension with Uexkull’s theory of animal subjectivity—specifically, current animal experimentation—are taken for granted and defended. Yong affirms a range of human identities and pronoun preferences, but his writing subtly refuses the animal subjectivities that he claims to be attempting to reveal—and on which Uexkull insists.