The Greeks cast their science from first principles, without troubling to examine the natural world. Aristotle changed everything, argues this elegantly written bookConsider the story of a famous natural scientist. A young man with a keen eye and an inquiring mind, the son of a doctor, was sent away to study in a city of culture. He took his studies with him on a voyage to islands overseas, whose wealth of animal and plant life immensely enriched his thought. A scholarly jackdaw, he took the lore of fishermen, stockmen and animal breeders, combining it with his own insight to produce a body of work whose influence resounds to this day. It can fairly be said that natural history, science as a whole, would be immeasurably the poorer without it.Not Darwin, but Aristotle whose life and work are reappraised by Armand Leroi in this magnificent book. Not surprisingly, we know so much less about his life than we do about Darwin's. He was born in 384BC in Stagira, a town not far from modern Thessaloniki. His father, Nicomachus, was physician at the court of Amyntas III of Macedon, then a barbaric and backwoods nation (for all that Amyntas' grandson, Alexander, would become Aristotle's most famous pupil). Continue reading...
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