The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

I like to think that a scientist may, just occasionally, see in Aristotle’s writings something that the philologists and philosophers have missed. For sometimes he speaks directly to any biologist’s heart, as when he tells us why we should study living things. We must imagine him in the marble colonnades of the Lyceum, addressing a group of truculent students. He gestures towards a mound of ink-stained cuttlefish decomposing in the Attic sun. Pick one, he says, cut, open, look. ‘. . .?’ Exasperated, he tries to make them understand: So we should not, like children, react with disgust to the investigation of less elevated animals. There is something awesome in all natural things. Some strangers, so the story goes, wanted to meet Heraclitus. They approached him but saw he was warming himself by the stove. ‘Don’t worry!’ he said. ‘Come on in! There are gods here too.’ One should, similarly, approach research on animals of whatever type without hesitation. For inherent in each of them there is something natural and beautiful. Nothing is accidental in the works of nature: everything is, absolutely, for the sake of something else. The purpose for which each has come together, or come into being, deserves its place among what is beautiful. Scholars call this ‘The Invitation to Biology’.