* The difference between wheat and darnel becomes obvious only if you turn them into bread. A fungal symbiont soaks darnel seeds with a cocktail of psychotoxic alkaloids and indolediterpene neurotoxins that causes dizziness, coma or death. In Attica aira was the drug of the Eleusinian rituals; in medieval Europe it was used to get a religious high. Its habit of sneaking into seed stock has made it a metaphor for false belief. It’s the ‘tares’ of Matthew 13:24–30 (‘Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn’). In the seventeenth century it was a symbol of subversion and the Pope.
* Note that he is explaining the existence of separate sexes, not sexual reproduction per se. So he’s not interested in the modern question of the adaptive explanation for sexual reproduction or recombination and its costs.
* That women menstruate more than any other species is true; that men produce more semen, for their size, than any other mammal is not. Boars produce 250ml of semen/ejaculate, a man about 2.5ml; given that they weigh about the same, ejaculate volume per unit mass in man is far less. In fact, taking copulation frequency into account, men produce less semen, per unit mass, than most farmyard animals.
* Since the brain is not the centre of higher cognition but a kind of radiator, this is not as deleterious as it may seem. It follows that while you can, in Aristotle’s view, literally fuck your brains out, you cannot shag yourself senseless.
* Eurasian cranes do co-ordinate their flights by bugling calls, but I have found no evidence that there is single leader. It is thought that flocks do not need centralized commands; at least they can be modelled by swarms of leaderless, interacting agents.
* Bees do indeed visit only one kind of flower at a time, a phenomenon known as ‘single flower visitation’. The movement they make upon returning to the nest is the waggle dance studied by von Frisch between 1923 and 1947. Aristotle does not, however, say that it’s a signal to the other bees. And workers do undertake specialized tasks.
* Curiously, Aristotle never explains what drones are good for. According to his model of bee generation, they’re a reproductive dead-end and he says that they don’t do any work. They seem to falsify his dictum that nature ‘does nothing in vain’.
* Ironically, the image of the mind as tabula rasa has its origin in The Soul (de Anima 430a1). There, however, the image is merely used to explain the workings of the intellect and not the cognitive state of newborns. (The transition from potential to actual thought is compared to the act of writing on a tablet.) The modern use of the image is due to Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas and Locke.
* To give but one example, the account of state formation that Francis Fukuyama puts forward in The Origins of Political Order (2011) is sociobiologically inspired and also has a strong Aristotelian flavour.
* A fragment of The Athenian Constitution was found among the papyri of an ancient rubbish tip in Oxyrhynchus, south-west of Cairo, in 1879; more was later found in a tomb in Hermopolis.
* A word that has not just a Greek provenance but an Athenian one, meaning ‘a prosecutor of fig smugglers’ – this is about trading with the enemy during the Peloponnesian War. It is the origin of the English ‘sycophant’ which, however, means something rather different, though equally unsavoury.
* In 1939 Rudolf Wittkower argued that the eagle–snake motif originated in Babylon four millennia ago whence it spread as far as Japan and the Aztec empire. Cultural diffusionists were bolder in those days.
* In the Renaissance, Aristotle’s humanist critics often compared him to a cuttlefish hiding behind his own ink. That’s funny but unfair; I think that he always tries to be clear; it’s just that he often fails.
* There is one other case where Aristotle suggests that a predator may have features that benefit its prey: at Historia animalium 563a20 he says that ‘it is said’ that nesting eagles abstain from food, and that their talons get turned so as to avoid harassing the young of wild animals. The information is weak, the reading is dubious and he makes nothing of it.
* In his 1942 classic, Voles, Mice and Lemmings: Problems in Population Dynamics, Charles Elton notes that this passage contains the essence of the problem of the regulation of population numbers.
* The claim here is not that Aristotle understands Gause’s Competitive Exclusion Principle or Lotka–Volterra predator–prey dynamics; nor does he need to, for the idea that animals are designed to promote a balance of nature was likely commonplace in ancient Greece. Herodotus, for example, appears to claim that predators have fewer offspring than they might in order to not consume all their prey: ‘Of a truth Divine Providence does appear to be, as indeed one might expect beforehand, a wise contriver. For timid animals which are a prey to others are all made to produce young abundantly, so that the species may not be entirely eaten up and lost; while savage and noxious creatures are made very unfruitful . . . [italics mine]’.
* Or is Aristotle’s global teleology even stronger than this? Could it be that, to extend my metaphor, our companies are not merely bound together in a co-operative web in search of profit, but are explicitly directed to do so by some greater power to some greater goal? That would be more like the way in which, in the 1980s, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) directed the keiretsu conglomorates for the sake of national economic growth. There’s a spectrum of possibilities ranging from rampant individualism to superorganism status, and it’s hard to say where, exactly, Aristotle thinks the world is located along that spectrum.
* Aristotle’s shark is apparently a ‘prudent predator’. The phrase was coined by Lawrence Slobodkin in Growth and Regulation of Animal Populations, 1961, but it was V. C. Wynne Edwards in Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, 1962, who argued that prudent predators could evolve by group selection. More generally, Wynne Edwards argued that ecological communities should be viewed as homeostatic systems, and he interpreted innumerable aspects of animal behaviours as such. George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966, demolished this view. He pointed out that group selection was a very weak force and that nearly all adaptations, predation behaviour included, were better interpreted as being the result of individual or genic selection. The recent revival of group selection notwithstanding, this conclusion remains sound.
* Galileo, by constrast, would argue that an object in motion comes to rest only when opposed by an equal force. This is his principle of inertia, codified by Newton in his First Law of Motion. Aristotle does not have the principle of inertia.
* Aristotle knows about comets and meteorites, but thinks they are sublunary phenomena. Greek astronomers apparently did not record any novae or supernovae, though early Chinese astronomers did.
* Consider Eudoxus’ career. Born in Cnidus, Asia Minor, c. 390, as a young man he travelled to Athens to study, briefly, at the newly founded Academy. He then went to Heliopolis, Egypt, to learn astronomy and also apparently to Italy to study with Archytas, a friend of Plato’s, and with Philistion of Locri, a philosophical physician. He was apparently very poor; friends and a passion for his subject kept him going. After further travels he returned to the Academy where he met Aristotle. By this time he had students of his own, among them Callippus, who later joined Aristotle at the Lyceum. Eudoxus finally returned to Cnidus, where he built an observatory and spent the remainder of his days looking at the stars, lecturing and doing legislative work for the city.
* Aristotle says that the circumference of the Earth has been estimated (by whom he does not say) as 400,000 stades. There is much uncertainty about the length of the ancient stade, a foot-race distance: estimates vary between 150 and 210 metres, but taking the median, 180 metres, Aristotle’s number gives 72,000 kilometres, or 1.8 × greater than the actual equatorial circumference. A generation later, Eratosthenes would estimate the circum
ferance as 250,000 stades or 45,000 kilometres, 1.2 × actual. I’m impressed. Aristotle adds some biogeographic evidence for the sphericity of the Earth: there are elephants in Africa and Asia, so perhaps those who claim the existence of a continual western landmass between the Pillars of Hercules and India are right. Just so Alfred Russel Wallace and Alfred Wegener used biogeography to argue for (prehistoric) connections between landmasses.
* Retrogradation was explained by Copernicus by abandoning the ancient geocentric cosmos. If, explained Copernicus, Earth is a planet that, like all planets, orbits the sun, then our position relative to the other planets will shift in complex ways so that they will sometimes appear to reverse direction relative to the stars.
* Here is another of the fundamental differences between Aristotelian and Newtonian physics: in the latter, movement in a straight line is the simplest possible motion; movement in a circle requires an additional centripetal force.
* Lambda Cold Dark Matter.
* To explain fine tuning, an infinite universe would have to contain an infinite number of local variations in the physical parameter values, rather than just those seen in the observable universe. In effect, this invokes a multiverse.
* Aristotle’s physics is devoid of the concept of a non-contact-dependent force. This is his best stab at one. Delbrück pointed out that the notion of an unmoved mover is inconsistent with Newton’s Third Law (When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to that of the first body) – that is, the celestial spheres must be exerting an equivalent force upon the unmoved mover. Others have claimed that, considering certain physical models of the celestial motions in The Movement of Animals 3, Aristotle appears to hint at Newtonian laws of motion. Such considerations are, however, beside the point: Newtonian mechanics simply cannot apply to his final cosmological model since unmoved movers are immaterial and therefore have no mass.
* Published in English as Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development, 1934, by the Clarendon Press, Oxford.
* Jim Lennox and Allan Gotthelf have shown, in many finely argued papers, how the theory of demonstration given in the Posterior Analytics filters through The Parts of Animals, and, following them, I have tried to explain how. But I am also struck by the fact that the Posterior Analytics contains not a single example of syllogistic demonstration drawn from the zoology. Aristotle’s examples are all about geometry and eclipses (well, there’s one involving leaves). That’s why, when I wanted to illustrate the method using a zoological example, I had to appropriate those modern sticklebacks.
* Though most scholars agree that the Organon is Academic; Guthrie, at least, thought that The Heavens is early and many suppose that The Generation of Animals is late.
* Artists often express disappointment upon reading his Poetics. Why, they cry, does Aristotle not tell us wherein beauty lies? He doesn’t because it is not a treatise on aesthetics written by another poet, but a treatise on how plays work written by a biologist.
* It was refounded in the first century AD.
* The archaeologists think that they have uncovered a palaestra, a gym, but the remains could well be a Roman villa; if so, then whatever’s left of Aristotle’s buildings is under some apartment block or the National War Museum. There was talk of turning the site into a park, but nothing has come of that nor will it, I now suppose, for many years.
* In Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, co-authored with his wife, Jean.
* It was also Thomas who, suspecting that the Arabic text might be corrupt, commissioned William of Moerbeke to translate Aristotle’s works from various Greek texts of Byzantine origin. Derived from Andronicus’ edition, they are the basis of our own Greek text. The oldest-known Greek Ms. of Historia animalium is a ninth-century fragment of Book VI from Constantinople (Parisinus suppl. gr. 1156, Bib. Nat., Paris). Most of the other extant Mss. are twelfth to fifteenth century.
* The first two books of Strabo’s Geography are, for example, devoted to defending his heroes (Homer) and criticizing his opponents (Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Posidonius).
* This was also a time when classicists with a gift for zoology and zoologists with a gift for classical studies such as C. J. Sundevall, H. Aubert and F. Wimmer, J. B. Meyer and W. Ogle studied his zoological works as zoology. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries these works have been mostly studied for their philosophical insights, and I would say that D’Arcy Thompson’s 1910 Historia animalium was the last edition in the zoological tradition except that W. Kullmann’s great The Parts of Animals, 2007, is both deeply philosophical and will tell you the truth about the dolphin’s respiratory tract.
* This was also a time when classicists with a gift for zoology and zoologists with a gift for classical studies such as C. J. Sundevall, H. Aubert and F. Wimmer, J. B. Meyer and W. Ogle studied his zoological works as zoology. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries these works have been mostly studied for their philosophical insights, and I would say that D’Arcy Thompson’s 1910 Historia animalium was the last edition in the zoological tradition except that W. Kullmann’s great The Parts of Animals, 2007, is both deeply philosophical and will tell you the truth about the dolphin’s respiratory tract.
* ‘[Aristotle] must be detached from his historical roots and neutralized before he can become accessible to posterity’ – Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, 1934.
* In the Meterologica Aristotle describes a variety of observations that are often said to be ‘experiments’. The most curious of these also occurs in Book II, 3. He wants to make the case that seawater is a mixture of water and some earthy stuff, salt. He claims that if you make a sealed vessel of wax, and submerge it in the sea, it will fill with fresh water, the salt having been filtered out by the wax. The procedure, however, was not a true experiment because it was uncontrolled. A suitable control would have been the submersion of a similar vessel made of some impermeable stuff – glass, bronze – in salt water. The absence of a control was, presumably, the fatal flaw. We can be sure that wax will not filter seawater (if it did, the deserts of Arabia would have flowered long ago) so, if Aristotle carried out the procedure (and I rather doubt he did), then any fresh water that he found in the sealed vessel must have come from condensation as the vessel cooled in the sea. Had he done a proper control, he would have seen that he was not entitled to attribute any fresh water found in the vessel to a marine origin and that his results shed no light on his original claim. The same kind of objection applies to his vivisections.
* Mick Crawley, who credits Nelson Hairston with having said it.
* What is the earliest description of a true experiment? Perhaps it is Herodotus’ account of one carried out by Psamtik, an Egyptian pharaoh of the seventh century BC. Psamtik, desiring to know the origin of humans, took two children and had them reared by goats in the absence of any human sound. (The controls are, implicitly, children raised by their parents.) The first comprehensible utterances of these goat-children resembled, it seems, the Phrygian word for ‘bread’. Psamtik concluded, by a kind of recapitulationist logic, that the Phrygians were a more ancient people than the Egyptians. This is one of several manipulations involving humans that have come to be known as ‘Forbidden Experiments’, and is now quite unreproducible. Experimental science, it seems, was born in sin.
* Diels claimed that the opening pages of Hero’s Pneumatics, which describes these experiments and was written in the first century AD, was largely based on one of Strato’s lost works. This, if true, would imply a remarkable advance in experimental rigour at the Lyceum within just a few decades of Aristotle’s death.
* That Galileo dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa by way of experimentally falsifying Aristotle’s theory of motion is apparently a myth. Others did though.
* Illumina HiSeq 2500 High Output run, 1 × coverage per genome. This number will be obsolete by the time this book is published and wil
l seem quaint should someone read it in 2024.
* You could call this the Wikipedia Principle.
* But who really knows what devices were current in the fourth century? The most sophisticated mechanical device of Greek antiquity, the Antikythera mechanism, an analogue computer composed of at least thirty interlocking gears, designed to demonstrate celestial motions, was built in Rhodes around 87 BC, a few centuries after Aristotle’s death. But, until it was hauled from the sea, no one supposed the Greeks remotely capable of building such a thing.
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