In Professor Armand Marie Leroi's fascinating documentary entitled ' Aristotle's Lagoon', Leroi explains how he discovered that Aristotle was perhaps the first published biologist working in the 4th century BC. Leroi is professor of evolutionary biology at Imperial College. What he feels Aristotle gets right is the observation of inheritance, or 'ados'. Also that animals group in families, or genera. What he gets wrong is the concept of spontaneous existence. He observes maggots and flies emerging from dead meat, an eels miraculously appearing out of the mud, noting that on dissection, they have no gonads. Aristotle also believes in the everlasting endurance of the world. Our hindsight helps us to know that nothing is permanent. Leroi is also surprised that Aristotle does not write about the extrodinary petrified forest to be found on the island of Lesbos, where he spent two years studying nature. Why did he appear to be blind to fossils?
But Leroi repeats the mantra first spoken on national television by Attenborough in 'Life on Earth' that there are two explanations for the existence of life. One is 'Religion', the other is 'Science'. In my mind this translates as 'mythology', and 'rational explanation'. He says that if he were to believe in God, his God would be the one that Aristotle believed in. This is a remote, benign God; a God who does not interfere. To me this is the God of the atheist. Invoking this God is of no consequence.
When Aristole dissected an animal, he was looking for the life force, or soul. He noted that animals continued to show signs of life even after he had removed their pumping heart. It is this concept of the soul which endures across all human existence. It's the fact that as Leroi, like Attenborough, notes, as a species we have the ability to create and destroy, and the amazing thing is, we know it.
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