The Lagoon
Page 54
sponges, 270–271
Ellis, John, view of, 278–279
spontaneous generation of animals, 227–229
Aristotle’s view of, 227–229, 227q, 232–235
Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van, 230–231
questioning of, 230–231
Stensen, Niels, 360q
stickleback, three-spined, 125–127, 126
sublunary world, concept of, 242–244
Sulla (Roman general)
looting of library, Piraeus, 7
the Lyceum, razing of, 6
Syennesis of Cyprus, 63
syllogistic reasoning, 124–127
stickleback evolution, applied to, 125–127
swallow (bird), 87, 253–254, 306
swordtails (fish), 285
Systema naturae (Linnaeus, C.), 101, 278
taxonomy, beginnings of, 101–104, 116–117
Aristotle’s view of, 272–273, 276
classification hierarchies, 106
‘folk-taxonomies’, 104–105
Linnaeus’s influences, 276
teeth, 81–82
teleological explanation, 84
Aristotle’s view of, 86–88
teratology, 212–213, 291–292
Thales of Miletus, 19
Aristotle’s analysis of the theories of, 19–20
Theodore of Gaza, 99–100
Theophrastus, 32, 413
Characters, 32–33
coral, red, references to, 271
cultivars, differences between, 296–297
Enquiries into Plants, 33, 271, 295
Explanations of Plants (Causis plantarum), 33
figs, references to, 245–246
fossils, knowledge of? 295, 456–457
heritable variation, view of, 211–212
Lyceum (Athens), head of, 350–352
plant transformations, 296–298
plants, seasonal growth of, 244
On Stones, 294
weather & seasonal variation, 257
works by (mentioned), 411
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 10, 32, 74, 373
On Aristotle as a biologist, vii
Greek Fishes, 143
Historia animalium (Aristotle), translation of, 13–14
Timaeus, The (Plato), 25–26, 289, 306
celestial bodies, 332
cosmos, view of, 321–322
Forms & ontology, 88
intelligent design, 85–86, 87
‘Ladder of Nature’, 277
tiger, 50
toothcarp, 15
torpedo ray, 138
tortoise, 167, 168, 169, 174
trumpet shell (kēryx), 2, 4, 5, 378
Transmutation Notebooks (Darwin, C.), 206q, 208, 274
Tuco Tuco, 374–375
tuna, 239, 240
unicorn (onos Indikos or oryx), 51
‘uniform parts’ of animals, 143–144
functional demands of, 145
Vérany, Jean Baptiste, 71
vitalism, 161–162, 176, 361, 369
vivisection, 167–169
von Siebold, Karl Theodor Ernst, 71
Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (Choiseul-Gouffier), 30
Watts, Isaac, 78
Wiener, Norbert, 176
wheat, 211, 296–297, 297n, 363, 443, 457
wind eggs, 183, 190, 190n, 438
Wolff, Christian, 84
woodpecker, 43, 67, 103
women, Aristotle’s views on, 187, 188, 306
Xenophanes of Colophon, 288
fossils, knowledge of? 292–293
Xenophon
honey & honey bees, references to, 310
Oeconomicus, 310
Socrates, discussion of, 23q
Youth & Old Age, Life & Death (Aristotle), 262–263
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Armand Marie Leroi is Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London. He is also a broadcaster and the author of Mutants: On the Form, Variety and Errors of the Human Body (2003), which has been translated into nine languages and won the Guardian First Book Award. He lives in London.
www.armandmarieleroi.com
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Requiem, an old-style serif typeface which takes inspiration from a set of inscriptional capitals in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi’s (1480–1527) Renaissance writing manual Il Modo de Temperare le Penne (1523). A calligrapher at the Apostolic Chancery in Rome, Arrighi’s manual offered one of the most elegant renderings of the classical alphabet. Requiem’s italics are based on the cancelleresca corsiva, ‘chancery cursive’, for which Arrighi is most famous.
* The traditional Latin title. In Greek: Historiai peri tōn zōiōn; in English: Enquiries into Animals.
* Aristotle’s phrase is historia tēs physeōs, of which biology is a part.
* ‘You need not know of the doctrines and writings of the great masters of antiquity, you need not have heard of their names, none the less you are under the spell of their authority’ – Theodor Gomperz (1911) Griechische Denker, vol. 1, p. 419; quoted and translated by Erwin Schrödinger (1954/1996) Nature and the Greeks, p. 3.
* With apologies to my Lesvian friends, I call the island ‘Lesbos’ rather than ‘Lesvos’, its official modern name, since that it how is was known to Aristotle and is known to most English readers.
* When Aristotle mentions the sea at Pyrrha, he usually refers to the euripos or ‘strait’, the entrance of Kolpos Kalloni. The Lagoon itself is better described as a limnothalassa or ‘lake sea’.
* Describing Thales’ views, Aristotle uses technical terms that were invented after Thales’ death (e.g. arkhē – origin or principle). This, in itself, makes us unsure that we know what Thales actually meant.
* Note how these jeers are directed at an attempt to solve a serious scientific problem, the cognitive basis of harmonic perception.
* The book I call the Enquiries into Plants is traditionally known as Historia plantarum; the book I call Explanations of Plants is traditionally called Causis plantarum. By extension, I should call Historia animalium ‘Enquiries into Animals’, but the book’s traditional, Latin title is the name that I first learnt to love it by, and so I have kept it.
* Ancient – modern Greek names: perkē –perka; skorpaina – skorpiomana; sparos – sparos; kephalos – kephalos. See Glossaries (Animal Kinds Mentioned) for English vernacular and Latin binomial names.
* ‘all that Lesbos has on it’: Iliad XXIV.
* It is not working with one’s hands per se that Aristotle finds objectionable, but rather lack of understanding. This is evident from his frequent use of craftsmanship as a metaphor in his biology as well as the reference to the ‘master-workman’ who presumably also uses his hands, but understands what he is about.
* These fishes produce sounds by drumming a specialized ‘sonic’ muscle against their swim bladders. The sound of the John Dory, Zeus faber, has been described by marine biologists as something between a ‘bark’ and a ‘growl’.
* The answer may be simple: the upper part of an elephant’s hind limbs are covered by low-hanging folds of skin so that, to the casual observer, they look shorter than the forelimbs. This misapprehension surely could not have survived a dissection.
* The Asian lion, Panthera leo persica, was probably extinct in Europe by the first century AD. It now survives only in India’s Gir Forest.
* An exaggerated story that has its origin in the bovine habit of arching their tails and squirting liquid faeces when threatened. The story may be an un-Aristotelian interpolation. It is repeated almost verbatim in On Marvellous Things Heard, a compilation of amazing stories that forms part of the Corpus Aristotelicum but that was written by one of Aristotle’s successors.
* Which include his belief that our heart has only three chambers instead of the four it does – he either fails to distinguish the right atrium from the right ventricle or mistakes the right atrium for part of
the vena cava. Related to this, he confuses the connection of the pulmonary arteries – they enter the right ventricle not the vena cava. He also supposes that the digestive system’s veins unite and join the inferior vena cava instead of running into the liver (that is, he misses the hepatic portal system); that the cephalic vein branches from the jugular near the ear (it doesn’t; it is a tributary of the subclavian); and that the brain is devoid of blood. He also invents a pair of veins that run from the inferior vena cava to the arms (this may be a Hippocratic hangover). I have distinguished arteries from veins; he does not. Of course he does not know that blood circulates.
* Aristotle’s selakhē is not equivalent to our Order Selachii which includes only sharks, but roughly equivalent to our Class Chondrichthyes which includes sharks, rays and skates.
* Aristotle also says that the batrakhos (frogfish, Lophius piscatorius) is a cartilaginous fish that lays hard-shelled eggs in a mass by the shore. Although he knows the fish well, here he’s all at sea. First, Lophius is not a cartilaginous fish; second, although Lophius is oviparous, his description of its egg masses does not tally with reality since, as Alexander Agassiz showed in 1882, the frogfish lays millions of eggs in enormous, gelatinous, pelagic ‘veils’. I think that either Aristotle, his informants or subsequent scribes have partially confused the batrakhos with the batos (rays, skates).
* Skylion is derived from the Attic Greek for ‘puppies’.
* This same argument was used by the astronomer Fred Hoyle in a radio interview in 1982: ‘The probability of life originating on Earth [by natural selection] is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.’ The argument, known as the ‘Boeing 747 Gambit’, is similar to Aristotle’s insofar as both hold that, since chance alone can’t bring about the regular production of some complex structure (a child’s teeth, an aeroplane), some purposeful agent must do so. Both fail to see that selection is not ‘chance’ but a determinate, creative process.
* The Platonic–Aristotelian terminology of division – eidos/species and genos/genus – filters through Roman encyclopaedists, Neoplatonic commentors, medieval schoolmen and Renaissance naturalists to Linnaeus, from whom we got it.
* And yet the British Birds – Nesting Series have a very German pedigree for they were made by Albrecht Günther (1830–1914), the Tübingen-born Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum (Natural History), who took his inspiration from a taxidermy display that he saw at the Crystal Palace in Southwark that had been originally made for the Great Exhibition of 1851 by the naturalist Hermann Plouquet, another German. Besides the petrel and the blackbird, still on display, a few of the original nests were salvaged and are now in the research collection.
* Gaza is already imposing an un-Aristotelian use of ‘genera’ and ‘species’ here.
* Aristotle’s manuscript didn’t have an index. In the absence of one, I find it hard to conceive how he retrieved, from the hundreds of scrolls in his library, his earlier thoughts on a given topic. Actually, it seems that he often didn’t bother, for he has a vexing habit of contradicting himself over trivial matters of fact, as if he’s forgotten what he wrote earlier. Indeed, as we’ll see, he does so on the elephant.
* Hippos as woodpecker may be a copyist error from pipō, Aristotle’s usual name for the bird. So maybe this isn’t Aristotle’s fault.
* Literally ‘pottery-shard-skinned’.
* Athenaeus, though, says that Speusippus wrote a book called Resemblances in which he claimed that trumpet shells, murexes, snails and clams are similar. On what grounds he did this, and to what ends, we do not know.
* When making this contrast he seems to forget about the shells of the paper nautilus and the mysterious ninth cephalopod.
* Since all of Aristotle’s translators use different terms to describe these poles, I give the Greek originals here: the before (to emprosthen); the behind (to opisthen); the above (to anō); the below (to katō); the right (to dexion); the left (to aristeron).
* For us, humans and tetrapods have the same axes: anterior–posterior, dorsal–ventral, left–right. This is because we ignore the fact that humans are upright, while, for Aristotle, it’s fundamental. To put it another way, where Aristotle bases his axes on functional analogy, we base ours, at least in vertebrates, on structural homology. Yet the difference between his approach and ours isn’t quite as deep as it seems. Looking beyond the vertebrates our axes aren’t really defined by structural homology either. By convention, a fruit-fly’s belly is ventral and its back is dorsal, but molecular genetic data suggest that insects are inverted relative to us, so that our dorsal is homologous to a fly’s ventral and our ventral to a fly’s dorsal. In that light, ‘dorsal/ventral’ is also now merely a statement of functional analogy.
* Equally brilliantly, he notices that gastropods have the same twisted geometry. In both cephalopods and gastropods, this is the result of a process called ‘torsion’ during which, as embryos, their bodies become twisted about.
* As indeed they do, one being mostly made of chitin, the other of calcium carbonate crystals.
* This sounds trivial, but it’s a startling discrepancy. In effect, it transfers the cephalopods from the blooded to the bloodless animals.
* By this I do not mean that kinds have overlapping boundaries. For Aristotle, an animal cannot belong to two kinds at the same level of the hierarchy simultaneously. A viper may (implausibly) be a live-bearing tetrapod that has scales and no legs or it may be a snake that is live bearing or it may be something else entirely – but it can’t be a live-bearing tetrapod/snake.
* Aristotle’s procedure bears some resemblance to phenetic classification methods developed in the 1970s insofar as it results in polythetic taxa. However, pheneticists traditionally insisted on overall similarity (use of all assayable characters with equal weight), which Aristotle does not.
* The error may be based on popular iconography which, as in the coinage of Tarentum, often depicted dolphins with underslung mandibles. To his credit Pliny did, however, get the function of the blowhole right.
* For the full matrix see Appendix I.
* The general usage is almost relict in English, but lives on in Greek. During the Colonels’ regime policemen were called Organa because they were the instruments of authority.
* The operative word is ‘scientists’. It is certainly the business of philosophers to worry over epistemological issues, but never was there a scientist who lost an hour’s sleep over, say, foundationalist v. constructivist justifications of truth. It’s not clear that Aristotle did either.
* Aristotle’s semi-aquatic elephant is a bit absurd. But it was also an inspired guess. Recent studies of elephant embryology, fossils and molecular phylogenetics show that the elephant evolved from an aquatic mammal. The inference is that its trunk, whatever its manifold uses now, was originally a snorkel. Interestingly, Aristotle knows another piece of evidence for this claim, the fact that the elephant, like seals and dolphins, has internal testicles. But he doesn’t make the connection.
* Aristotle vacillates on just how bendy the elephant’s legs are. Five centuries later, Aelian, the Roman paradoxographer, thought it odd that elephants could dance even though they don’t have joints. He may have picked up a distorted Aristotelian echo or perhaps he got it from someone else. In any event, the idea that elephants don’t have knees and sleep standing up became firmly established in medieval bestiaries and survived to become the subject of a couplet by Shakespeare, a stanza by Donne and the subject of Sir Thomas Browne’s withering scorn. Kinematic studies show that the elephant’s legs are quite flexible.
* Nor, in general, do evolutionary biologists. Attempts to explain the characters of phyla or classes in adaptive terms are rather rare, unless it is to tell some story about the ‘rise of the mammals’ or the ‘fall of the dinosaurs’.
* Aristotle’s zoology is broadly correct. Is his explanation for the presence of the epiglott
is in mammals, and its general absence in reptiles and birds, correct too? Surely not. But why did mammals evolve an epiglottis when their ancestors had already solved the problem?
* The function of the spleen was mysterious until the last century. It filters the blood and, in doing so, removes red blood cells, maintains iron balance and is a centre for mounting adaptive and innate immune responses.
* Actually, bile is probably an example of an excretory product that has been secondarily utilized. It’s an excretion product of bilirubin, the product of defunct red blood cells harvested by the spleen, transported to the liver, gathered by the gall bladder and excreted into the intestine where it is used in fat digestion.
* Compare The Parts of Animals II, 2 with The Descent of Man & Sexual Selection II, 17.
* This same principle is still much used in evolutionary biology to explain apparent trade-offs between organs or other features. Recently, for example, it has been used to explain the evolution of horns in scarab beetles and the way they appear to trade off with other head structures.