- The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi
We are told as schoolchildren that Aristotle got the number of teeth of women wrong, having apparently not considered asking his wife to open her mouth. Actually, the man whom Bertrand Russell called the first to write like a professor got much else wrong as well, confusing the heart with the brain and muddling the contribution of the sexes to procreation, not to mention his theory of animal souls, which was based on shaky anatomy, and his chemistry and theory of motion, both confined to oblivion. It was Bacon and his Scientific Revolution that would come to reject much of his teaching, but Aristotle got a lot right, too, as Leroi shows in this elegant, reasoned apologia. For despite the formal and final causes and much else now dismissed, Aristotle chose to look closely at the things of this world, where, despite his teacher Plato’s admonition to search for truth in the realm of pure ideas, he determined real knowledge was to be gained. Taxonomy was thus born from the upstart’s empirical disposition. It all began in the northeast Aegean, in a resplendent lagoon on the island of Lesbos, where Aristotle opened his eyes to take a close look at (mainly) sea creatures. We have the cuttlefish and the periwinkle to thank for the momentous descent from the world of Forms. [End Page 128]
Oren Harman, who chairs the graduate program in science, technology, and society at Bar Ilan University, is the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome and The Price of Altruism, which received the Los Angeles Times prize for best book in science and technology. He is coathor (with Michael Dietrich) of Outsider Scientists and Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology.