Aristotle's biology
Aristotle's biology is the theory of
The theory describes five major biological processes, namely
Aristotle's writings on biology, the first in the
Apart from his pupil,
Context
Aristotle's background
Aristotelian forms
Aristotle's biology is constructed on the basis of
Aristotle further noted that there are many bird forms within the bird kind – cranes, eagles, crows, bustards, sparrows, and so on, just as there are many forms of fishes within the fish kind. He sometimes called these atoma eidē, indivisible forms.[b] Human is one of these indivisible forms: Socrates and the rest of us are all different individually, but we all have human form.[4] More recent studies have shown that Aristotle used the terms γένος (génos) and εἶδος (eidos) in a relative way. A taxon that is considered an eidos in one context can be considered a génos (which includes various eide) in another.[5]
Finally, Aristotle observed that the child does not take just any form, but is given it by the parents' seeds, which combine. These seeds thus contain form, or in modern terms information.
System
Soul as system
As analysed by the
- a metabolic process, whereby animals take in matter, change its qualities, and distribute these to use to grow, live, and reproduce
- a cycle of temperature regulation, whereby animals maintain a steady state, but which progressively fails in old age
- an information processing model whereby animals receive sensory information, alter it in the seat of sensation,[e] and use it to drive movements of the limbs. He thus separated sensation from thought, unlike all previous philosophers except Alcmaeon.[8]
- the process of inheritance.
- the processes of embryonic development and of spontaneous generation
The five processes formed what Aristotle called the soul: it was not something extra, but the system consisting exactly of these mechanisms. The Aristotelian soul died with the animal and was thus purely biological. Different types of organism possessed different types of soul. Plants had a vegetative soul, responsible for reproduction and growth. Animals had both a vegetative and a sensitive soul, responsible for mobility and sensation. Humans, uniquely, had a vegetative, a sensitive, and a rational soul, capable of thought and reflection.[6][9][10]
Processes
Metabolism
Aristotle's account of metabolism sought to explain how food was processed by the body to provide both heat and the materials for the body's construction and maintenance. The metabolic system for live-bearing tetrapods[f] described in the Parts of Animals can be modelled as an open system, a branching tree of flows of material through the body.[11]
The system worked as follows. The incoming material, food, enters the body and is concocted into blood; waste is excreted as urine, bile, and faeces, and the
All the tissues are in Aristotle's view completely uniform parts with no internal structure of any kind; a cartilage for example was the same all the way through, not subdivided into atoms as Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 BC) had argued.[13] The uniform parts can be arranged on a scale of Aristotelian qualities, from the coldest and driest, such as hair, to the hottest and wettest, such as milk.[11][12]
At each stage of metabolism, residual materials are excreted as faeces, urine, and bile.[11][12]
Temperature regulation
Aristotle's account of temperature regulation sought to explain how an animal maintained a steady temperature and the continued oscillation of the thorax needed for breathing. The system of regulation of temperature and breathing described in Youth and Old Age, Life and Death 26 is sufficiently detailed to permit modelling as a negative feedback control system (one that maintains a desired property by opposing disturbances to it), with a few assumptions such as a desired temperature to compare the actual temperature against.[14]
The system worked as follows. Heat is constantly lost from the body. Food products reach the heart and are processed into new blood, releasing fire during metabolism, which raises the blood temperature too high. That raises the heart temperature, causing lung volume to increase, in turn raising the airflow at the mouth. The cool air brought in through the mouth reduces the heart temperature, so the lung volume accordingly decreases, restoring the temperature to normal.[g][14]
The mechanism only works if the air is cooler than the reference temperature. If the air is hotter than that, the system becomes a positive feedback cycle, the body's fire is put out, and death follows. The system as described damps out fluctuations in temperature. Aristotle however predicted that his system would cause lung oscillation (breathing), which is possible given extra assumptions such as of delays or non-linear responses.[14][16]
Information processing
Aristotle's information processing model has been named the "centralized incoming and outgoing motions model". It sought to explain how changes in the world led to appropriate behaviour in the animal.[17]
The system worked as follows. The animal's
There is thus a causal chain which transmits information from a sense organ to an organ capable of making decisions, and onwards to a motor organ. In this respect, the model is analogous to a modern understanding of information processing such as in sensory-motor coupling.[18][17]
Inheritance
Aristotle's inheritance model sought to explain how the parents' characteristics are transmitted to the child, subject to influence from the environment.[19][h]
The system worked as follows. The father's semen and the mother's menses have movements that encode their parental characteristics.[19][20] The model is partly asymmetric, as only the father's movements define the form or eidos of the species, while the movements of both the father's and the mother's uniform parts define features other than the form, such as the father's eye colour or the mother's nose shape.[19]
Aristotle's theory has some symmetry, as semen movements carry maleness while the menses carry femaleness. If the semen is hot enough to overpower the cold menses, the child will be a boy; but if it is too cold to do this, the child will be a girl. Inheritance is thus
The child's sex can be influenced by factors that affect temperature, including the weather, the wind direction, diet, and the father's age. Features other than sex also depend on whether the semen overpowers the menses, so if a man has strong semen, he will have sons who resemble him, while if the semen is weak, he will have daughters who resemble their mother.[i][19]
Embryogenesis
Aristotle's model of
The system worked as follows. First, the father's semen curdles the mother's menses, which Aristotle compares with how rennet (an enzyme from a cow's stomach) curdles milk in cheesemaking. This forms the embryo; it is then developed by the action of the pneuma (literally, breath or spirit) in the semen. The pneuma first makes the heart appear; this is vital, as the heart nourishes all other organs. Aristotle observed that the heart is the first organ seen to be active (beating) in a hen's egg. The pneuma then makes the other organs develop.[21]
Aristotle asserts in his
Method
Aristotle has been called unscientific
Scientific style
Aristotle did not do experiments in the modern sense.[26] He used the ancient Greek term pepeiramenoi to mean observations, or at most investigative procedures,[27] such as (in Generation of Animals) finding a fertilised hen's egg of a suitable stage and opening it so as to be able to see the embryo's heart inside.[28]
Instead, he practised a different style of science: systematically gathering data, discovering patterns common to whole groups of animals, and inferring possible causal explanations from these.
From the data he collected and documented, Aristotle inferred quite a number of
Mechanism and analogy
Aristotle's use of explanation has been considered "fundamentally unscientific".[23] The French playwright Molière's 1673 play The Imaginary Invalid portrays the quack Aristotelian doctor Argan blandly explaining that opium causes sleep by virtue of its dormitive [sleep-making] principle, its virtus dormitiva.[k][31] Argan's explanation is at best empty (devoid of mechanism),[23] at worst vitalist. But the real Aristotle did provide biological mechanisms, in the form of the five processes of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, embryonic development, and inheritance that he developed. Further, he provided mechanical, non-vitalist analogies for these theories, mentioning bellows, toy carts, the movement of water through porous pots, and even automatic puppets.[23]
Complex causality
Readers of Aristotle have found the
Empirical research
Aristotle was the first person to study biology systematically. He spent two years observing and describing the zoology of
His observations on
Among many other things, he gave accurate descriptions of the four-chambered stomachs of
Classification
Aristotle distinguished about 500 species of birds, mammals,
Group | Examples (given by Aristotle) |
Blood | Legs | Soul (Rational, Sensitive, Vegetative) |
Qualities (Hot–Cold, Wet–Dry) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Man | Man | with blood | 2 legs | R, S, V | Hot, Wet |
Live-bearing tetrapods | Cat, hare | with blood | 4 legs | S, V | Hot, Wet |
Cetaceans |
Dolphin, whale | with blood | none | S, V | Hot, Wet |
Birds |
Bee-eater, nightjar | with blood | 2 legs | S, V | Hot, Wet, except Dry eggs |
Egg-laying tetrapods | Chameleon, crocodile | with blood | 4 legs | S, V | Cold, Wet except scales, eggs |
Snakes |
Ottoman viper |
with blood | none | S, V | Cold, Wet except scales, eggs |
Egg-laying fishes | Sea bass, parrotfish | with blood | none | S, V | Cold, Wet, including eggs |
(Among egg-laying fishes): placental selachians |
Shark, skate | with blood | none | S, V | Cold, Wet, but placenta like tetrapods |
Crustaceans |
Shrimp, crab | without | Several legs | S, V | Cold, Wet except shell |
Cephalopods |
Squid, octopus | without | tentacles | S, V | Cold, Wet |
Hard-shelled animals |
Cockle, trumpet snail | without | none | S, V | Cold, Dry (mineral shell) |
Larva-bearing Insects | Ant, cicada | without | 6 legs | S, V | Cold, Dry |
Spontaneously generating | Sponges, worms |
without | none | S, V | Cold, Wet or Dry, from earth |
Plants |
Fig |
without | none | V | Cold, Dry |
Minerals | Iron | without | none | none | Cold, Dry |
Animals with blood included live-bearing tetrapods, Zōiotoka tetrapoda (roughly, the
Animals without blood were divided into soft-shelled Malakostraka (
Scale of being
Aristotle stated in the History of Animals that all beings were arranged in a fixed scale of perfection, reflected in their form (eidos).[o] They stretched from minerals to plants and animals, and on up to man, forming the scala naturae or great chain of being.[52][53] His system had eleven grades, arranged according to the potentiality of each being, expressed in their form at birth. The highest animals gave birth to warm and wet creatures alive, the lowest bore theirs cold, dry, and in thick eggs.[35] The system was based on Aristotle's interpretation of the four elements in his On Generation and Corruption: Fire (hot and dry); Air (hot and wet); Water (cold and wet); and Earth (cold and dry). These are arranged from the most energetic to the least, so the warm, wet young raised in a womb with a placenta were higher on the scale than the cold, dry, nearly mineral eggs of birds.[54][10] However, Aristotle is careful never to insist that a group fits perfectly in the scale; he knows animals have many combinations of attributes, and that placements are approximate.[55]
Influence
On Theophrastus
Aristotle's pupil and successor at the
On Hellenistic medicine
After Theophrastus, though interest in Aristotle's ideas survived, they were generally taken unquestioningly.[60] It is not until the age of Alexandria under the Ptolemies that advances in biology resumed. The first medical teacher at Alexandria, Herophilus of Chalcedon, corrected Aristotle, placing intelligence in the brain, and connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. Herophilus also distinguished between veins and arteries, noting that the latter pulse while the former do not.[61]
On Islamic zoology
Many classical works including those of Aristotle were transmitted from Greek to Syriac, then to Arabic, then to Latin in the Middle Ages. Aristotle remained the principal authority in biology for the next two thousand years.[62] The Kitāb al-Hayawān (كتاب الحيوان, Book of Animals) is a 9th-century Arabic translation of History of Animals: 1–10, On the Parts of Animals: 11–14,[63] and Generation of Animals: 15–19.[64][65]
The book was mentioned by
On medieval science
When the Christian
On Renaissance science
Renaissance zoologists made use of Aristotle's zoology in two ways. Especially in Italy, scholars such as
Early Modern rejection
In the
Aristotle still represented the enemy of true science into the 20th century. Leroi noted that in 1985, Peter Medawar stated in "pure seventeenth century"[76] tones that Aristotle had assembled "a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility".[76][77]
19th century revival
Zoologists working in the 19th century, including
20th and 21st century interest
Zoologists have frequently mocked Aristotle for errors and unverified secondhand reports. However, modern observation has confirmed one after another of his more surprising claims,
Aristotle remains largely unknown to modern scientists, though zoologists are perhaps most likely to mention him as "the father of biology"; Few practicing zoologists explicitly adhere to Aristotle's great chain of being, but its influence is still perceptible in the use of the terms "lower" and "upper" to designate taxa such as groups of plants.[91] The evolutionary zoologist
The deep thinker who would be most amused by .. deep homologies is Aristotle, who was fascinated by the natural world but bewildered by its inner workings.[95]
Works
Aristotle did not write anything that resembles a modern, unified textbook of biology. Instead, he wrote a large number of "books" which, taken together, give an idea of his approach to the science. Some of these interlock, referring to each other, while others, such as the drawings of The Anatomies are lost, but referred to in the History of Animals, where the reader is instructed to look at the diagrams to understand how the animal parts described are arranged,[96] and it has even been possible to reconstruct (admittedly with much associated uncertainty) what some of these illustrations may have looked like, from Aristotle's descriptions.[97]
Aristotle's main biological works are the five books sometimes grouped as On Animals (De Animalibus), namely, with the conventional abbreviations shown in parentheses:
- History of Animals, or Inquiries into Animals (Historia Animalium) (HA)
- Generation of Animals (De Generatione Animalium) (GA)
- Movement of Animals (De Motu Animalium) (DM)
- Parts of Animals (De Partibus Animalium) (PA)
- Progression of Animals or On the Gait of Animals (De Incessu Animalium) (IA)
together with On the Soul (De Anima) (DA).[68]
In addition, a group of seven short works, conventionally forming the Parva Naturalia ("Short treatises on Nature"), is also mainly biological:
- Sense and Sensibilia[98] (Sense)
- On Memory[99]
- On Sleep[100]
- On Dreams[101]
- On Divination in Sleep[102]
- On Length and Shortness of Life[103]
- On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration[104]
Notes
- ^ The English and taxonomic Latin genus derive from this, and have related meanings.
- ^ In modern terms, it has been argued that these roughly correspond to species, and some texts use that translation. Aristotle did not formulate a definition resembling that of a modern species, however, and some of his forms are other taxa such as genera or families.
- ^ From Latin informo, I form, give shape to.
- ^ In modern terms, this implies a symbolic system. Armand Leroi notes that biologists will at once think in this context of the nucleotide "letters" of DNA which give form to organisms.[4]
- ^ Like the ancient Egyptians, Aristotle believed that the seat of the rational and sensitive souls was the heart, not the brain[7]
- mammals.
- ^ In modern terms, this is homeostasis.[15]
- nature-nurture debate.
- sex-linked.[19]
- Chiroptera(bats).
- ^ First Doctor: Most learned bachelor / Whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why / Opium makes one sleep.
Argan [the Aristotelian]: ... The reason is that in opium resides / A dormitive virtue, Of which it is the nature / To stupefy the senses.[31] - ^ It is not safe to assume that species or groups with Linnean names that resemble Aristotle's are the animals he was referring to, as zoologists including Linnaeus guessed rightly or wrongly what Aristotle meant in his short descriptions. Sometimes an ancient Greek name must mean exactly one species – hippos is definitely horse, when it's a land animal; but sometimes a name referred to several similar species, as English names often do today: for instance, kephalos means any of 4 species of grey mullet.[39]
- haemoglobin, but of a different kind from vertebrates.
- ^ Aristotle did not nest his groups into a hierarchical tree.
- ^ To a modern biologist, such a scale suggests evolution, but Aristotle saw it as a permanent, eternal arrangement.
- ^ Scot translated HA, GA, and PA, and all of the Parva Naturalia.[67]
- ^ Gessner borrowed the title from one of Aristotle's books.
- Captain James Cook and Charles Darwin, some two millennia later.[90]
- ^ Leroi has written several papers on the subject, cited in his book, and made a BBC film[92] about it.
References
- ^ a b Leroi 2014, p. 14.
- ^ Lennox, James (27 July 2011). "Aristotle's Biology". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
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- ^ a b Leroi 2014, pp. 370–373.
- ^ Mason 1962, p. 45.
- ^ Guthrie 1981, p. 348.
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- ^ a b c d e f Leroi 2014, pp. 400–401.
- ^ a b c d Leroi 2010, pp. 261–284.
- ^ Leroi 2014, pp. 79–80, 143–145.
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- ^ a b Leroi 2014, pp. 197–200.
- ^ Leroi 2014, pp. 181–182.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Leroi 2014, pp. 369–373.
- ^ a b c Leroi 2014, pp. 365–368.
- ^ Leroi 2014, p. 397.
- ^ Taylor, 1922. p. 42
- ^ Leroi 2014, pp. 361–365.
- ^ Leroi, Armand Marie (Presenter) (3 May 2011). "Aristotle's Lagoon: Embryo Inside a Chicken's Egg". BBC. Retrieved 17 November 2016.
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- ^ Leroi 2014, p. 279.
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- ^ Leroi 2014, pp. 296–297.
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- ^ Mason 1962, p. 56.
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- ^ Kruk, R., 1979, The Arabic Version of Aristotle's Parts of Animals: book XI–XIV of the Kitab al-Hayawan, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam-Oxford 1979.
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- ^ Kruk, R., 2003, "La zoologie aristotélicienne. Tradition arabe", DPhA Supplement, 329–334
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- ^ Leroi 2014, p. 352.
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- ^ Leroi 2014, pp. 3 and passim.
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- ^ De Sensu et Sensibilibus
- ^ De Memoria et Reminiscentia
- ^ De Somno et Vigilia
- ^ De Insomniis
- ^ De Divinatione per Somnum
- ^ De Longitudine et Brevitate Vitae
- ^ De Juventute et Senectute, De Vita et Morte, De Respiratione
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