Current
Biology
Volumen 20, Número 3, 9 de
febrero de 2010, páginas R84-R85
Aristotle’s Lagoon
BBC. www.bbc.co.uk
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.01.032
El
sustancial legado en Biología del filósofo griego es a menudo olvidado, según afirma Armand
Leroi en un nuevo programa de televisión. Nigel Williams informa.
Muchos biólogos modernos ven
cualquier cosa antes de Darwin como la prehistoria, como investigación plagada
de malentendidos y errores. Pero este punto de vista deja a un lado una
extraordinaria gama de trabajo durante siglos con mucho valor y perspicacia.
Así que una nueva mirada sobre el trabajo biológico de Aristóteles en una isla
griega casi 2.500 años atrás, supone un recordatorio fresco y fascinante del
pensamiento antiguo. Un nuevo programa de televisión a cargo del biólogo
evolutivo Armand Leroi, del Imperial College de Londres, centrado en el trabajo
biológico de Aristóteles estrenado por la BBC el mes pasado, pone de relieve
hasta qué punto algunas investigaciones antiguo han iluminado el mundo
biológico. "La biología de Aristóteles está casi completamente olvidada",
dice Leroi, quien recuerda que se encuentra expuesta a través de Historia animalium, trabajo que encontró
en una librería de Atenas hace una década. "En los diez años transcurridos
desde entonces, he estado tratando de entender lo que había estado sucediendo
en la magnífica mente de Aristóteles".
Aristóteles fue un miembro
de la élite del siglo IV a. C. en Atenas. Nació en Tracia, en el noreste de la
Grecia moderna y su padre fue médico del rey Filipo de la vecina Macedonia.
Marchó a Atenas para estudiar en la Academia de Platón, donde permaneció hasta
la muerte de Platón en el 348 a. C. Como relata Leroi, Aristóteles hizo un
viaje de dos años a la isla del este del Egeo de Lesbos, para estudiar la fauna
en los alrededores de una laguna espectacular, que ahora se llama Kallonis, que
comprende una gran parte del centro de la isla.
El libro revela cómo Aristóteles
establece el estudio de los animales de la laguna: por la observación combinada con
la disección y la descripción de muchos de los animales más pequeños.
Rápidamente observó que los delfines no son peces, como usualmente se piensa,
ya que respiran aire. […]
"Una vez ordenados los
datos, comienza a enfrentar la teoría con la observación. El problema más
profundo es que en el huevo y el útero se origina la vida, cómo los seres vivos
llegar a ser", dice Leroi. Aristótéles es la primera persona de la que tenemos
constancia de la apertura de un huevo y la descripción del embrión de un pollo
- "la primera persona en describir el origen de un ser vivo", dice. Y esta
observación demostró ser uno de los mayores retos para Aristóteles. No creía que
una descripción del material de dicho evento fuera suficiente para explicarlo.
"Se necesita algo más, algo que recibe de sus padre, que lo in-forma, a lo
que llamó ‘eidos’.” […]
Leroi cree que gran parte de
la biología moderna fue fundada por Aristóteles, "así que ¿por qué nos hemos
olvidado de él?", se pregunta. Una de las razones fue que algunos aspectos
de su biología estaban equivocados.
Mientras que Aristóteles
propuso el eidos de los padres como
lo que dirige el desarrollo de sus crías, quedó desconcertado por las
anguilas y las moscas. Las anguilas eran entonces abundantes en la laguna de Lesbos
y, cuando Aristóteles las disecó con otros peces, se quedó perplejo al no encontrar
evidencia anatómica de los tejidos reproductivos. No fue sino hasta muchos
siglos después que el extraordinario ciclo de la vida de estas anguilas fue descubierto,
revelando que migran de vuelta hacia el mar a través de miles de kilómetros
para reproducirse. Así que Aristóteles propuso que se generan a partir del barro
en el que se encuentra comúnmente.
Aristóteles no era
evolucionista. Se mostró en desacuerdo con las ideas creacionistas de Platón,
pero él fue un “eternalista”, dice Leroi. La eternidad niega la historia, todo
se mantiene igual y Aristóteles no dice nada acerca de los fósiles, constata Leroi. […] A Leroi le causa perplejidad que Aristóteles
no tuviese en consideración los restos petrificados de un impresionante bosque al oeste de
Lesbos, que casi con toda seguridad habría conocido. […]
Después de la estancia de
Aristóteles en Lesbos, regresó al continente para convertirse en tutor del hijo, de 13 años de edad, de Filipo de Macedonia: Alejandro. No está claro qué
influencia tuvo Aristóteles sobre el futuro Alejandro Magno. Aristóteles
regresó a Atenas en el año 335 a. C. y pasó los siguientes 12 años dirigiendo
su propia academia (el Liceo), donde le gustaba caminar y hablar con sus
compañeros. Él tuvo conciencia de haber iniciado una escuela o una
investigación organizada superando con creces todo lo que había pasado antes.
Su legado científico no es solo amplio sino que es monumental. Fue leído, copiado y plagiado y, en el siglo
XIII, se enseñó en las universidades de toda Europa.
Current Biology
Volume 20, Issue 3, 9 February 2010, Pages R84–R85
Feature
Aristotle's lagoon
Nigel Williams
Aristotle's Lagoon, BBC. www.bbc.co.uk
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.01.032, How to Cite or Link Using DOI
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Summary
The Greek philosopher's substantial biological work is often now overlooked according to Armand Leroi in a new television programme. Nigel Williams reports.
Main Text
Many modern biologists see anything before Darwin as prehistory: research riddled with misunderstandings and errors. But this view misses an extraordinary range of work over centuries with much of value and insight. So a new look at the biological work of Aristotle, coming from a Greek island almost 2,500 years ago, provides a fresh and fascinating reminder of ancient thinking. A new television programme by evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi, of Imperial College London, on the biological work of Aristotle shown by the BBC last month, highlights just how much some ancient research illuminated the biological world. “Aristotle's biology is almost completely forgotten,” says Leroi, who recalls coming across a translation of Aristotle's biological work Historia Animalium in an Athens bookshop a decade ago. “In the ten years since, I've been trying to understand what had been going on in Aristotle's magnificent mind.”
Insight: The deep bay of Kallonis in the centre of the Greek island of Lesvos was the focus of Aristotle's work studying the creatures in and around it. (Photo: Armand Leroi.)
Figure options
Aristotle was a member of the fourth-century BC Athens elite. He was born in Thrace in the north-east of modern Greece, and his father was physician to King Philip of neighbouring Macedonia. He went to Athens to study at Plato's Academy where he stayed until Plato's death in 348 BC. As Leroi recounts, Aristotle then took a two-year trip to the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos, to study the fauna in and around a dramatic lagoon, now called Kallonis, which comprises a large part of the centre of the island.
The book reveals how Aristotle set to studying the animals of the lagoon: observation combined with dissection and description of many of the smaller ones. He quickly observed that dolphins were not fish, as commonly thought, as they breathed air as he watched them in the lagoon. Aristotle also noted that the abundant cuttlefish that come into the lagoon to breed defecate through a tube at the top of their head, quite in contrast to the digestive systems of most other animals. And Aristotle quizzed the locals on their observations. “As Darwin spoke to pigeon fanciers, Aristotle spoke to fishermen,” says Leroi.
“What he does next was revolutionary: having sorted the facts, he begins to pit theory against observation. The deepest problem was how life originates in the egg and the womb, how living things come to be”, says Leroi. He's the first person we have on record opening an egg and describing the embryo of a chicken — the first person to describe the origin of a living thing, he says. And this observation proved one of the biggest challenges to Aristotle. He didn't believe a material description of such an event was sufficient to explain it. “Something else is needed, something it gets from its parents that shaped it — he called this thing ‘eidos’.” This element is ‘form’, says Richard King, of the University of Glasgow, Leroi's colleague and co-scriptwriter. “Eidos is something like information.”
Aristotle argued that all animals had a soul — when an organism dies the soul dies with it. The soul is not material but it controls matter — it is what twenty-first century biologists call a system. “What he calls eidos, we call genes,” says Leroi. Every species, Aristotle believes, has its own eidos.
The scientific legacy he left is not vast, it is monumental. It was read, copied and plagiarised and, by the thirteenth century, it was taught in universities throughout Europe.
Leroi believes much of modern biology was founded by Aristotle, “so why have we forgotten him?” he asks. One of the reasons was that some of his biology was wrong.
While Aristotle proposed the eidos from parents directed the development of their offspring, he was baffled by eels and flies. Eels were then abundant in the Lesvos lagoon and, when Aristotle dissected them and compared them with other fish, he was puzzled to find no anatomical evidence of reproductive tissue. It was not until many centuries later that the extraordinary life cycle of these eels was unravelled, revealing that they migrate back out to sea over thousands of kilometres to breed. So he proposed that they generated from the mud in which they were commonly found.
Aristotle also puzzled over the appearance of maggots in rotting flesh and likewise concluded that they arose spontaneously. “A disaster”, says King. “One of his catastrophic mistakes.” For these creatures their eidos seems to have had an altogether more prosaic and erroneous origin. And it was almost 2,000 years before we have a record of an experiment in which one dead fish was covered in muslin and another left open, to show that maggots do not spontaneously generate.
And Aristotle was no evolutionist. He disagreed with Plato's creationist ideas, but was himself an ‘eternalist’ says Leroi. Eternity denies history where everything stays the same and Aristotle doesn't say anything about fossils, Leroi notes. “Aristotle realised species are related but have their own role. Combatants simply fight for ever.” Leroi is puzzled that Aristotle did not consider the petrified remains of an impressive forest in the west of Lesvos that he almost certainly would have known about. The massive ancient tree trunks were turned to stone by a volcanic eruption but remain, even to today, an impressive sight amongst an otherwise barren Mediterranean landscape.
And it would be hard for Aristotle if he were around now to ignore change. “Biodiversity has declined,” says Leroi. And the fishermen are complaining of declining catches. The lagoon is just a microcosm of wider ecological degradation and devastation in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. It represents an “unutterable sadness”, says Leroi at the site where Aristotle had done all that biology so many centuries ago. But Aristotle made no mention of the spectacular flocks of flamingoes that now appear on Lesvos. The magnificent birds are apparently a relatively new arrival over recent decades to Aristotle's lagoon. While fishermen and some ecologists lament the demise of many long familiar species, a dramatic new bird has found food there in recent years: one sign of changes taking place in ecosystems on a wider scale.
After Aristotle's stay on Lesvos, he returned to the mainland to become tutor to the 13-year-old son of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander. It is not clear what influence Aristotle had on the future Alexander the Great. Aristotle came back to Athens in 335 BC and spent the next 12 years running his own academy, where he liked to walk and talk with his colleagues. He was widely thought to have begun a school or organised enquiry far exceeding anything that had gone before. But Leroi is keen to champion Aristotle's biology. “The scientific legacy he left is not vast, it is monumental.” It was read, copied and plagiarised and, by the thirteenth century, it was taught in universities throughout Europe, says Leroi. Creatures are exquisitely fitted to their environment. Adaptation requires an explanation. “They cannot assemble themselves, they need information,” says Leroi. “And Aristotle was a biologist who realised that.”
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