The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

It is sometimes said that all modern biologists are ‘materialists’ insofar as all our explanations take account of the brute properties of matter – chemistry and physics. But no biologist is a naive, Democritean, materialist, for all agree that the distinctive properties of living things depend on the arrangement of matter. The elements, though necessary, are not sufficient for life. An ordering principle – information – is needed as well. We are, to coin a term, ‘informed materialists’. That was Aristotle’s view as well. It is why he identifies psychē as the actualization of eidos. It is only a beginning. Soul appears in his book on developmental biology and heredity – The Generation of Animals; in his book on animal locomotion – The Movement of Animals; in his functional anatomy – The Parts of Animals; and, most of all, in his physiology – The Length and Shortness of Life and Youth & Old Age, Life & Death. Soul, in short, pervades Aristotle’s biology. When we survey all that he says about its workings it becomes apparent that he has given a detailed and coherent account, embracing many levels of biological organization, of how animals abstract matter from the environment, transform it, distribute the transformed matter throughout their bodies and use it to grow, maintain themselves, reproduce, perceive the world and respond to it – and that the form, structure or organization of all this activity is the soul. The result is a vision that is at once disturbingly alien and ...