Indeed, reading Aristotle, it’s easy to suppose that he is struggling towards, or even has, a theory of evolution. He isn’t and hasn’t. Nowhere in his works does he claim, as Darwin did, that all animals are descended from some remote common ancestor. Nowhere does he suggest that one kind of animal can transform into another. Nowhere does he lament some kind that has gone extinct. Genos, he says, is a word that can be used in several different senses – but there’s no hint that, in the biology, he’s using the genealogical one. When he says that ‘nature makes small steps’ he means it in a static
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