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Our Burning Planet

The debt science owes to a brilliant Greek with insatiable curiosity

The debt science owes to a brilliant Greek with insatiable curiosity
Aristotle teaching at the Lyceum. (Image: Sketchy)
Don Pinnock
By Don Pinnock
23 Apr 2025
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‘He drew down the stars into the realm of reason and taught the winds and stones to speak the language of cause and form.’ ~ Anon

The man is strolling along the shoreline regarding with intense interest every life form in the pools, molluscs that appear as waves recede and life on the pebbly beach. He’s not an ordinary man but possibly one of the most intelligent, inquisitive humans to have ever lived. 

It’s not an ordinary beach, but one on the volcanic Aegean island of Lesbos with crystal-clear waters, phenomenal marine and bird life and many hot springs. 

He stoops to pick up what we would see as a starfish. What he’s seeing is a system of interconnected structures within a unique form perfect for its function in the fabric of life in the ocean. 

On the basis of his exploration of that seashore and more, he’ll arrive at conclusions about all life and develop systems of thought that enable humans to move from superstition and abstract conjecture to a practical understanding of living things. 

He will not get everything right — this is 345BC after all — but his systematic probing of marine life in the Pyrrha lagoon (the modern Gulf of Kalloni) will lay the foundation for his pioneering work in biology. 

Aristotle with a starfish. (Image: Sketchy)



He will go on to classify animals, plants and natural phenomena in a methodical way, laying the groundwork for biology, zoology and meteorology and his ideas will dominate Western thinking for nearly 2,000 years. Through the scholars Avicenna and Averroes they will also deeply influence the Islamic world. 

Aristotle, the man on the beach, will be considered the father of natural science. He will diverge from his teacher, Plato, for whom the visible world is only a shadow of a higher, unchanging reality of perfect Forms or Ideas that can be apprehended through Reason.

Aristotle’s ideas are almost exactly the opposite. For him reality is found in the observable world where all things have a purpose (telos) and knowledge comes from empirical observation and rational analysis of cause, effect and substance. Plato’s ideas will be grounded in philosophy, Aristotle’s in natural science. 

Where Plato sought universal truths in abstract realms, Aristotle wanted to count frog toes and dissect molluscs. In Aristotle’s mind, truth didn’t hover in the ether; it strutted and clucked and occasionally laid an egg.

Scientific inquiry


After studying under Plato in Athens for 20 years, Aristotle eventually parted ways with his teacher. He would go on to identify about 500 species of birds, mammals, fish, insects and other invertebrates. Among these, he dissected about 35 species to study their internal anatomy. 

He wasn’t just curious about what things were, he wanted to know how they worked and why they were the way they were. He believed that no structure existed without a reason tied to its function within an organism’s survival or reproduction.

His method — combining empirical observation with theoretical reasoning — remains central to scientific inquiry today. His recognition that organisms could be grouped based on shared characteristics foreshadowed the work of Carl Linnaeus in taxonomy and Charles Darwin in evolutionary biology.

Aristotle didn’t just document species. He explored biological processes such as metabolism, reproduction, inheritance, embryogenesis and temperature regulation. His concept of teleology was central to his understanding of anatomy. In the specialised world of science today, such breadth of inquiry is almost unheard of.

To modern readers, some of Aristotle’s conclusions seem wildly off. 

He believed, for instance, that eels emerged spontaneously from mud and that bees collected their young from flowers. He wrote that when beavers were threatened they bit off their testicles. 

But these inaccuracies don’t diminish his achievements. Given the tools of his time — which mostly consisted of eyeballs, crude knives and a willingness to get dirty — his record of anatomical and behavioural observations is astonishing.

His works, particularly History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals, remained the gold standard in natural science for centuries. In medieval Europe, his ideas were considered so authoritative that to question them was akin to heresy. 

Early years


Born in 384 BCE in Stagira, northern Greece, Aristotle was deeply influenced by his early exposure to medicine through his father Nicomachus, who served as a physician to the Macedonian king. This familial connection probably sparked Aristotle’s interest in biology and natural sciences.

After spending about two years on Lesbos, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to tutor his son, Alexander (later known as Alexander the Great), in 343 BCE. This invitation led Aristotle to leave Lesbos for Pella, the Macedonian capital, to begin his role as Alexander’s tutor. 

Done tutoring (art and science would flourish in the wake of Alexander’s many conquests), Aristotle returned to Athens in 334BC to establish what for him was his dream project, the Lyceum. 

Aristotle. (Image: Wikipedia)



Aristotle teaching at the Lyceum. (Image: Sketchy)



It was to become a pioneering institution, combining teaching, research and the development of a large library. It served as both a philosophical school and a centre for systematic research across disciplines such as zoology, physics, political theory and aesthetics.

As a result of anti-Macedonian sentiment following Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BCE, Aristotle was forced to flee Athens to avoid the fate of Plato’s teacher Socrates: death by poison as a form of execution. He died a year later on the island of Euboea. Did the poisoners follow him? History does not tell.

Legacy


Aristotle left a great body of work, perhaps numbering as many as two hundred treatises, from which, sadly, only about 31 survive.

He viewed biology as inseparable from psychology. In his treatise On the Soul, he explored the relationship between body and soul using biological principles. He argued that the soul is the essence that gives life to matter, comparable to how form defines substance.

Aristotle wasn’t just a philosopher. He was an adventurer in science driven by insatiable curiosity about the natural world. His enthusiasm for discovery resonates even today among biologists who share his passion for unravelling life’s complexities.

His motto seems to have been: observe, question, classify, understand. No microscope, no DNA sequencing, no carbon dating — just a reed basket, an inquiring mind and an irrepressible urge to make sense of the messy, magnificent variety of life.

In a letter, Darwin referred to him as “a marvellous thinker”, remarking that “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle”. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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