Aristotle's biology is included in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The theory of biology is based on systematic observation and collection of data and is embodied in the books on the science.The marine biology of the Pyrrha lagoon, now the Gulf of Kalloni, was described by him during his stay on the island of Lesbos.His concept of form is very different from Plato's theory of Forms.
The five major biological processes are metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, embryogenesis, and inheritance.Modern biologists can create mathematical models of the mechanisms described if each is defined in some detail.Modern biologists use a similar style of science when exploring a new area, with systematic data collection, discovery of patterns, and inference of possible causality.He made observations of living animals and carried out dissections.He distinguishes dozens of insects and other animals.He describes the internal parts of over a hundred animals.
The first in the history of science, Aristotle's writings on biology, are scattered across several books, forming about a quarter of his writings that have survived.The History of Animals was one of the main biology texts, along with the lost drawings of The Anatomies.
In ancient Greece, no research of the same scope was done, except for Theophrastus, who wrote a matching Enquiry into Plants.The medieval Islamic world was influenced by Aristotle's biology.The only biological work widely taught in medieval universities was On the Soul, but translation of Arabic versions and commentaries into Latin brought knowledge of Aristotle back into Western Europe.The association of his work with medieval scholasticism caused Early Modern scientists such as Galileo and William Harvey to reject his theories.His errors and reports were critiqued for hundreds of years.Some of his long-derided observations in marine biology have been found to be true, and he has found better acceptance among zoologists.
Plato's Academy in Athens was where Aristotle studied for 20 years.Like Plato, he sought universals in his philosophy, but unlike Plato he backed up his views with detailed and systematic observation, including the natural history of the island of Lesbos, where he spent about two years, and the marine life in the seas around it.This study made him the earliest scientist.Until the 16th century, no detailed work on zoology was done.He founded his own school in Athens and taught there for the last dozen years of his life.About a quarter of his work is on zoology.Theophrastus wrote a book about plants.[4]
Plato's theory of Forms is the basis of the biology that is constructed by Aristotle.Plato's Forms were the "blueprints in the mind of God".Plato thinks that real things in the world could be approximations to the perfect Forms.Plato's view was developed into a set of biological concepts.He uses the same Greek word that means first of all the features that make up an animal.The word means a kind.A bird has feathers, a beak, wings, and a hard-shelled egg.[5]
There are many bird forms within the bird kind, just as there are other forms of fish.He used to call them atoma eid, indivisible forms.Human is one of the indivisible forms because we all have the same form.[5]
The child does not take just any form, but is given it by the seeds of the parents.These seeds contain information.This third sense is sometimes intended by giving the analogy of a woodcarving.It takes its form from wood, the tools and carving technique used to make it, and the design laid out for it.The informational nature of form is emphasized by the argument that a body is compounded of elements like earth and fire.[d]
Five major interlocking processes were analysed by the evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi.
The system consisting of the five processes was called the soul because it was not something extra.The soul of the animal was purely biological.Different types of organisms possessed different kinds of soul.Plants were responsible for reproduction and growth.The animals were responsible for mobility and sensation.Humans were capable of thought and reflection.It was 5, 8 and 9.
The account of metabolism sought to explain how food was processed in order to provide both heat and materials for the body's construction and maintenance.An open system is a branching tree of flows of material through the body.10
The system worked.The incoming material, food, enters the body and is made into blood, while the waste is released as heat, bile, and faeces.Blood is used to make flesh and other tissues such as bones and teeth.Leftover blood can be made into fat.semen is made from fat from all over the body.[10][11]
All of the tissues are the same, with no internal structure of any kind, and all of them are completely uniform.The person had argued.The uniform parts can be arranged on a scale of Aristotelian qualities, from the driest to the hottest.[10][11]
The account of temperature regulation sought to explain how an animal maintained a steady temperature.The system of regulation of temperature and breathing described in Youth and Old Age, Life and Death 26 is sufficiently detailed to allow modelling as a negative feedback control system, one that maintains a desired property by opposing disturbances to it.It was [13].
The system worked.The heat is lost from the body.Food products reach the heart and are processed into new blood, which raises the blood temperature too high.That raises the heart temperature and causes lung volume to increase.The cool air in the mouth lowers the heart temperature and the lung volume decreases, restoring the temperature to normal.[g]
If the air is cooler than the reference temperature, the mechanism works.The body's fire is put out if the air is hotter than that.fluctuations in temperature are damped out by the system.He predicted that his system would cause lung oscillation, which is possible given extra assumptions.There are 13 and 15 words.
The centralized incoming and outgoing motions model is a part of the information processing model.It wanted to explain how changes in the world led to appropriate behavior in an animal.[16]
The system worked.The animal's sense organ is altered when it sees something.The change in the animal's seat of sensation is caused by this.This in turn causes a change in the heart's heat, which is enough to cause a mechanical impulse to move a limb.The consistency of the joints is affected by the heat in the heart.[16]
Information from a sense organ to an organ capable of making decisions is transmitted to a motor organ.The model is similar to a modern understanding of information processing.[17][16]
The inheritance model sought to explain how the parents' characteristics are transmitted to the child.[18][h]
The system worked.The father and mother's semen have movements that show their parental characteristics.The model is asymmetric because only the father's movements define the form or eidos of the species, while the movements of both the mother and father define other features.[18]
The semen movements carry maleness and the menses carry femaleness in the same way.If the semen is hot enough to overpower the cold menses, the child will be a boy, if it is too cold to do this.Unlike the Hippocratic model which was continuous and blend, inheritance is particulate.[18]
Factors that affect temperature include the weather, the wind direction, and the father's age.If a man's semen is strong, he will have sons who look like him, while if it is weak, his daughters will be like their mother.[i]
The model of embryogenesis sought to explain how the inherited parental characteristics cause the formation and development of an embryo.[20]
The system worked.The father's semen causes the mothers menses to break, which is similar to how rennet causes milk in cheesemaking.The embryo is formed by the action of the pneuma in the semen.The heart is the first organ that the pneuma makes appear.The first organ seen to be active in a hen's egg is the heart.The other organs are made by the pneuma.[20]
The use of explanation and his scientific style are some of the reasons why philosophers have called him unscientific.His explanations are difficult to understand due to his complicated system of causes.The charges need to be considered in the light of what he knew at the time.His systematic gathering of data, too, is obscured by the lack of modern methods of presentation: for example, the whole of History of Animals Book VI is taken up with a list of observations of the life histories of birds that would now be summarized.[23]
Experiments were not done in the modern sense.The ancient Greek term pepeiramenoi means observations, or at most investigative procedures, such as finding a fertilised hen's egg of a suitable stage and opening it so as to be able to see the embryo.[26]
He used a different style of science: gathering data, discovering patterns common to whole groups of animals, and inferring possible explanations from these.This style is common in modern biology when large amounts of data become available in a new field.It doesn't result in the same certainty as experimental science, but it sets out testable hypotheses and constructs a narrative explanation of what is observed.Aristotle's biology is scientific.[22]
A number of rules relating the life-history features of the live-bearing tetrapods were inferred from the data he collected and documented.The following are correct predictions.Brood size decreases with adult body mass, so that an elephant has fewer young per brood than a mouse.Elephants live longer than mice because of their body mass, and they are heavier.As a final example, fecundity decreases with lifespan, so long-lived kinds like elephants have fewer young in total than short lived ones.[28]
The use of explanation by Aristotle has been found to be fundamentally unscientific.Molire's play The Imaginary Invalid portrays a doctor who says opium causes sleep because of its dormitive dormitiva.At worst vitalist, Argan's explanation is at best empty.The biological mechanisms that he developed were in the form of five processes of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, embryo development, and inheritance.He provided mechanical, non-vitalist analogies for the theories, such as bellows, toy carts, and the movement of water through porous pots.[21]
The four causes that he uses in his biological explanations are not helped by many centuries of confused exegesis.These are easy for a biological system.What a system is constructed from is the material cause.teleology describes adaptation under the pressure of natural selection and is what the goal and formal cause are for.The efficient cause is how a system moves and develops.Biologists continue to offer explanations.There are 30 and 21 days.
The first person to study biology systematically was Aristotle.The Pyrrha lagoon in the centre of Lesbos was one of the places he observed and described for two years.His data is assembled from his own observations, statements given by people with specialized knowledge, and less accurate accounts provided by travellers from overseas.[32]
His writings on catfish, electric fish, and angler fish are detailed.His claim that the octopus had a hectocotyl arm was discredited until it was rediscovered in the 19th century.He separated the aquatic mammals from fish, and knew that sharks and rays were part of the group he called Selach.[33]
He described the four-chambered stomachs of ruminants and the embryological development of the dogfish.His accounts of 35 animals are detailed enough to convince biologists that he killed some of them.[38]
About 500 species of birds, mammals and fishes were distinguished by Aristotle.His system of classification was influential for over two thousand years.Animals with blood, Enhaima, and animals without blood were distinguished by Aristotle.[m] 43
Animals with blood included live-bearing tetrapods, Ziotoka tetrapoda, being warm, having four legs, and giving birth to their young.The cetaceans, Ktd, had blood and gave birth to live young, but did not have legs, so they formed a separate group.The Ornithes had blood and laid eggs, but had only 2 legs, so they formed a distinct group of over 50 kinds.The iotoka tetrapods had blood and four legs, but were cold and lay their eggs.The snakes had blood, but no legs, and a separate group of dry eggs.The fishes, Ikhthyes, had blood but no legs and laid wet eggs.The selachians Selakh (sharks and rays) had cartilages instead of bones.[42]
Animals without blood were divided into soft-shelled Malakostraka, Ostrakoderma, and Malakia.Other animals with no blood included fish, starfish, sponges, red coral, sea anemones, and various worms.
According to the History of Animals, all beings were arranged in a way that reflected their form.The scala naturae or great chain of being was formed when they stretched from minerals to plants and animals.His system had eleven grades that were arranged according to the potentiality of each being.The highest animals gave birth to warm and wet creatures, the lowest bore theirs cold, dry, and in thick eggs.The system was based on the four elements of On Generation and Corruption: Fire, Air, Water and Earth.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 because they were arranged from the most energetic to the least.Aristotle knows that animals have many combinations of attributes, and that placements are approximate, but he doesn't insist that a group fits perfectly in the scale.50
The History of Plants is the first book of its kind.Rather than focusing on formal causes, Theophrastus described how plants functioned.Theophrastus was quietly empirical.Theophrastus suggests that one kind of plant can transform into another, like when a field sown to wheat turns to the weed darnel.[54]
After Theophrastus, interest in Aristotle's ideas was taken unquestioningly.The age of Alexandria under the Ptolemies halted advances in biology.The first medical teacher at Alexandria put intelligence in the brain and connected the nervous system.The latter pulse while the former do not, as Herophilus noted.[56]
From Greek to Syriac, then to Arabic, and finally to Latin in the Middle Ages, many classical works were transmitted.For the next two thousand years, Aristotle was the main authority in biology.The Kitb al-Hayawn is a 9th-century Arabic translation of the History of Animals: 1–10.59 and 60
The book was commented on by Avicenna in his Kitb al-if.Avempace's interpretations of On the Parts of Animals and Generation of animals were criticized by Averroes.61
When the Christian Alfonso VI of Castile retook the Kingdom of Toledo from the Moors in 1085, an Arabic translation of Aristotle's works with commentaries by Avicenna and Averroes emerged into European medieval scholarship.Many of Averroes's commentaries were translated by Michael Scot.Albertus Magnus added his own zoological observations and an encyclopedia of animals to his comments on Aristotle.In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas merged metaphysics with Christian theology.Albert treated Aristotle's biology as science, writing that experiment was the only safe guide and joining in with the types of observation that Aristotle had made.Most of Aristotle's biology was not included in the natural philosophy curriculum.[63]
The Renaissance zoologists used Aristotle's zoology in two different ways.Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo wrote commentaries on Aristotle.Konrad Gessner's 1551 Historia Animalium is one of the new encyclopedias that authors used as a source of their own and their colleagues' observations.The title and philosophy of the work were new.Modern zoology was found by arranging the animals according to Aristotle's theories, unlike folklore which was seperated from his 1552 De differentiis animalium.It was 63 and 64.
Not helped by his association with medieval theology, Aristotle came to represent all that was wrong and obsolete in the Early Modern period.The strawman Simplicio wrote "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" in 1632.William Harvey showed that blood circulates.There are 66 and 67 words.
The enemy of true science was represented by Aristotle.According to Leroi, Peter Medawar stated in 1985 that Aristotle had assembled "a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility".[68]
George Cuvier, Johannes Peter Mller, and Louis Agassiz were Zoologists in the 19th century.D'Arcy Thompson was a classically-educated zoologist when he translated History of Animals in 1910.71, 72, 73, 74.
There is a possibility of a selection process following the random combination of body parts.Aristotle immediately rejected the possibility, and he was in any case discussing ontogeny, the Empedo clean coming into being of an individual from component parts.[75]
Zoologists ridicule Aristotle for errors and secondhand reports.The ability of elephants to snorkel with their trunks while swimming is one of the more surprising claims that has been confirmed by modern observation.[78]
Zoologists are most likely to mention him as the father of biology, though he is largely unknown to modern scientists.The evolutionary zoologist has an interest in the biology of the philosopher.The concept of homology began with Lewis I.Held commented.
The deepest thinker would be the one who was most amused by the natural world.[84]