- Book information
- The Lagoon: How Aristotle invented science by Armand Marie Leroi
- Published by: Bloomsbury
- Price: £25
The ancient Greek philosopher deserves our homage, and Armand Marie Leroi delivers it in his edifying and excellent book
EVERY generation of biologist must rediscover Aristotle for itself, to paraphrase Armand Leroi in a BBC documentary, Aristotle's Lagoon.
Once a highway, this path has been trodden by only a few life scientists in four generations. And in taking it, the author retraces Aristotle's footsteps to Kalloni lagoon on the island of Lesbos, where the philosopher studied nature, providing charming vignettes from his visits there.
There is a serious purpose, too. Aware that scientists tend to distort past thinkers by imposing present conceptions and values on them, Leroi argues that today's biologists can think like Aristotle because he forged their basic concepts, and because nature shows us the same phenomena. But to best understand Aristotle, a biologist must see what he saw in Lesbos.
The Lagoon is an intellectual homage – an admiring, deeply researched and considered reconstruction of Aristotle's thinking about living things. The effort to get inside his head seems driven by a heartfelt sympathy, a sense of wonder about life on Earth shared across 2300 years, and by the modern scientist's urge to give credit where credit is due.
And for Leroi, Aristotle deserves credit for nothing less than inventing biology – perhaps even science. Earlier philosophers, like his teacher Plato, deduced stories about the fundamental causes of natural phenomena from first principles. But physicians in the empirical tradition, to which Aristotle was exposed by his physician father, learned how to predict the course of disease from observation. Aristotle was arguably the first to attempt an evidence-based natural philosophy (or "science"), melding empiricism with logic.
The book is structured with major sections corresponding to topic areas in Aristotle's work, such as taxonomy, nutrition, or cosmology, each broken into half a dozen short chapters, often containing Leroi's Lesbos experiences to make the natural phenomena accessible and intriguing. For example, we learn about the vigorous argument he observed among taverna patrons over whether sardelles and papalinas are really the same fish (they look similar but taste different, and live in different waters). This example of the classification problem nicely introduces Leroi's discussion of Aristotle's taxonomic system.
The prose is so lively, the thinking so lucid, and the use of such devices so artful, one might not notice it all adds up to a 500-page systematic analysis of a massive, dry, sometime jumbled philosophical corpus from a profoundly alien society. That many readers will come away entertained, and with even a slightly better understanding of Aristotle would be a major literary feat even if the book did not offer significant original contributions.
But it does. Take Leroi's account of Aristotle's concept of soul, psyche. It is well thought through, closely argued on textual evidence, and innovative. As my wonderful teacher, classicist Arthur Adkins, said, psyche was "for Greeks only the difference between a dead rabbit and a live rabbit". In other words, to explain psyche is to explain life.
Leroi shows that Aristotle was no vitalist, in the sense that he required nothing more than ordinary matter and its properties to explain life. He understands that for Aristotle the soul was its form (eidos, which can also mean species), the order of a creature's material – a pattern of activity constituting its life.
Organisation as life is a view remarkably close to modern biology: for Leroi, biology is all about mapping the body's regular material transformations. I am sympathetic to his effort to credit Aristotle with something very like modern biological insights, and indeed, I find Leroi's arguments that Aristotle invented the concepts of metabolic networks and feedback control plausible.
Leroi offers another innovation in finding a "dual-inheritance" theory in Aristotle's writing, resolving the conundrum of form (eidos again) coming only from the father and the undeniable phenomenon that children resemble both parents. Thus, for Aristotle the movements of the generative fluids of female and male can, without major self-contradiction, transmit details of form (like Socrates's snub nose) less significant than those defining the species, imparted by the father.
Elsewhere in Leroi's discussion of reproduction, we read: "What is the immediate source of the design that we see in living things? It is the information that they inherit from their parents." Or, to paraphrase the BBC documentary again, Aristotle taught that material self-assembles into organisms only with the help of information.
Here Leroi goes too far. Despite acknowledging the danger of anachronism, he is actually likening the Aristotelian concept of eidos to modern biology's notion of genetic information. Biology's concept of information is less than a century old, deriving from computer science. Psyche, the realisation of a creature's eidos, was an activity, more like an oscillation than a formula or code.
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