The Lagoon

Starred review from July 28, 2014
Leroi (Mutants) lovingly rescues the reputation of Aristotle’s alternately meticulous and bizarre studies of animal behavior from the ruins left in the wake of derision during the Scientific Revolution. Leroi brings a modern sensibility to, yet evokes an air of timelessness with, his gorgeous descriptions of the ecology of the fishing villages of Lesbos where Aristotle both carefully dissected fishes and gave credence to the most fantastic of animal folk stories. His Aristotle creates systems of categories in a determined search for the reasons behind the existence of living things in their myriad forms. Leroi smoothly drops readers into Aristotle’s world of concocting elements and vital heat, of formal causes and nutritive, sensitive, and rational souls. He muses on how close Aristotle came to the ideas of Linnaeus and Darwin, having collected so much of the kinds of data they would eventually need despite being constrained by core axioms that saw animal types as diverse but essentially static. Leroi credits Aristotle with the most basic tenet of empirical science—to understand the world, look first and then try to explain what you see—but resists crediting him with textually unsupported prescience, which highlights beautifully the fact that ideas can be self-consistent, elegant, yet entirely wrong. Illus.

Starred review from August 15, 2014
Leroi (Evolutionary Development Biology/Imperial Coll. London; Mutants: On the Form, Variety and Errors of the Human Body, 2003) calls on his expertise and his experience as a BBC science presenter to explain why Aristotle's writings on science are still relevant today. The author introduces readers to Aristotle's work in the field of biology and shows where it accords with modern understanding and where it is wildly off-base. Although best known as a philosopher, Leroi explains that the major body of Aristotle's work (much of which has been lost) dealt with natural science. In his search for the causes of change, the philosopher embarked on an ambitious project. "By the time he was done," writes the author, "matter, form, purpose and change were no longer the playthings of speculative philosophy but a research programme." Aristotle based his groundbreaking efforts to discover the workings of nature on a wide variety of sources, including his own observations. In addition to humans, a whole host of animals came under his purview and led him to classify different species, thus anticipating Carl Linnaeus in the 17th century. Leroi shows how Aristotle pondered the common features of all living creatures, as well as their divergence, and attempted to account for their functional differences. According to the author, Aristotle's line of thinking led him to attempt to understand the operation of "five interlocked biological systems"-the nutritional system, thermo-regulation, perception and cognition, and inheritance-and indirectly influenced Darwin's discovery of the theory of natural selection. He dismisses critics who fault Aristotle for being unscientific because he did not conduct experiments using controls. Many of his assumptions proved to be wrong, but this is to be expected in a new field. Leroi compares Aristotle's effort to assemble a huge volume of data to the practices of current scientists in the "age of Big Data." A wide-ranging, delightful tour de force.

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September 15, 2014

Aristotle is often considered the father of biology. But why? Evolutionary biologist Leroi (Mutants; Imperial Coll. London) has written a powerfully convincing case for why the scientist deserves such a distinction. Infused with biology, geography, philosophy, history, and travel details, this work paints a luxuriant portrait of Aristotle at the cusp of early science, a discipline that was sometimes empirical, sometimes not. The author describes the principles of scientific study practiced by Aristotle, including his vast observations of primarily fauna geographically centered on and located around the Aegean Island of Lesbos, where a unique inlet (lagoon) created an ecosystem that fed a diversity of life. Reaching beyond the vicissitudes of time with critical yet sympathetic commentary on Aristotle's keen and insightful observations, Leroi successfully salvages Aristotle's science by clearing up misunderstandings regarding language, species, and methodologies, all while including insights from modern biology. In the end, whether addressing cuttlefish vivisection or the reproductive systems of figs and fish, Leroi has restored Aristotle's work to the modern reader. VERDICT Highly recommended to readers of natural history and the history and philosophy of biology.--Scott Vieira, Sam Houston State Univ. Lib., Huntsville, TX

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2014
To enter the mind of one of the world's greatest philosophers, Leroi relies on the cuttlefish. For in Aristotle's astonishing efforts to understand this lowly sea creature, Leroi discerns a great thinker's defining passions. Readers see how in painstakingly dissecting the cuttlefishand many other animal speciesAristotle defies the otherworldly idealizing of Plato, peering intently at this world's life-forms, striving to interpret these forms with unprecedented analytical rigor. Overstepping the limits of mere agriculture and husbandry, Aristotle gropes toward modern science. Though Aristotle fumbles at key points in his biology, readers will marvel at how much he got right without a modern laboratory. The soundness of his analytical method helps explain why Aristotle can seamlessly incorporate biological reasoning into his highly regarded treatises on ethics, literature, and politics. If at times the interconnections in Aristotle's thought anticipate the theorizing of modern sociobiologists, at other times those interconnections transport us to celestial heights now shared by modern cosmologists. It may surprise readers how much Aristotle influenced his successors in biological scienceincluding Van Helmont, Harvey, Linnaeus, and Cuvierpioneers who corrected the great Greek's blunders by applying his own insistently empirical methodology. A remarkable recovery of an ancient thinker's daringly original enterprisesand mind-set.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)