Aristotle’s lobster: the image in the text

Lieven, Alexander Fürst von; Humar, Marcel; Scholtz, Gerhard

doi:10.1007/s12064-020-00322-6

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The main common cause of shared similarities between taxa in biological systematics is now considered (Hennig 1965;O'Hara 1997) to be the phylogeny (though convergence, often reflecting a similar ecology, can also play a role), which is a concept alien to Aristotle's work. Nevertheless, our results, along with the evidence provided by Fürst von Lieven &Humar (2008) andVoultsiadou et al (2017), logically leads to the conclusion that Aristotle thought that there was indeed one best way to classify biodiversity (Wiener 2015), which is compatible with monistic realism. Modern taxonomic practice is also inherently monistic, given that we seek to uncover the Tree of Life (TOL).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Phylogenetic signal in characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

Laurin¹,

Humar²

2022

Comptes Rendus Palevol

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The influential Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) is almost unanimously acclaimed as the founder of zoology. There is a consensus that he was interested in attributes of animals, but whether or not he tried to develop a zoological taxonomy remains controversial. Fürst von Lieven and Humar compiled a data matrix from Aristotle’s Historia animalium and showed, through a parsimony analysis published in 2008, that these data produced a hierarchy that matched several taxa recognized by Aristotle. However, their analysis leaves some questions unanswered because random data can sometimes yield fairly resolved trees. In this study, we update the scores of many cells and add four new characters to the data matrix (147 taxa scored for 161 characters) and quote passages from Aristotle’s Historia animalium to justify these changes. We confirm the presence of a phylogenetic signal in these data through a test using skewness in length distribution of a million random trees, which shows that many of the characters discussed by Aristotle were systematically relevant. Our parsimony analyses on the updated matrix recover far more trees than reported by Fürst von Lieven and Humar, but their consensus includes many taxa that Aristotle recognized and apparently named for the first time, such as selachē (selachians) and dithyra (Bivalvia Linnaeus, 1758). This study suggests that even though taxonomy was obviously not Aristotle’s chief interest in Historia animalium, it was probably among his secondary interests. These results may pave the way for further taxonomic studies in Aristotle’s zoological writings in general. Despite being almost peripheral to Aristotle’s writings, his taxonomic contributions are clearly major achievements.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Phylogenetic signal in characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

Laurin¹,

Humar²

2022

Comptes Rendus Palevol

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“…Aristotle must have been a good naturalist, as he described fairly accurately many systematically relevant characters in various taxa. These data found in Aristotle's History of Animals can be used to score data matrices, which have been subjected to phylogenetic parsimony analysis in two studies (Fürst von Lieven & Humar, 2008; Laurin & Humar, 2022). In these studies, the trees were rooted using the sea anemone, known to Aristotle as akalēphē .…”

Section: Earliest Biological Nomenclaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

ThePhyloCode: The logical outcome of millennia of evolution of biological nomenclature?

Laurin¹

2023

Zoologica Scripta

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Biological nomenclature harks back to a remote prehistoric past, as shown by the universality of fairly sophisticated folk taxonomies and nomenclatures found on all inhabited continents. Ethnobiologists have suggested that these nomenclatures include cryptic ‘ethnotaxonomic ranks’, although the existence of these ranks has been increasingly questioned recently. The fact that no trace of such ranks has been evoked in Aristotle's classification of animals but that they have been described in antique Roman ethnotaxonomies casts further doubts about these cryptic ranks. The advent of rank‐based nomenclature (RN) in the mid‐18th century has had a pervasive, but not only positive, influence on biological nomenclature. The use of a single type and of a subjective, artificial nomenclatural rank does not delimit taxa under RN. This is even a goal of RN, according to Principle 2 of the Zoological Code. This contrasts with the nomenclatures of other fields, some of which are designed to delimit entities fairly precisely (e.g. geopolitics, stratigraphy, chemistry), and in which ranks are either defined more objectively (e.g. geopolitics, chemistry), or used informally and relegated to a secondary role (e.g. biogeography, paleobiogeography), or vary in time (e.g., paleobiogeography) or space (e.g., stratigraphy). A trend towards more explicit and precise delimitation of entities over time is also discernible in some fields, especially geopolitics and stratigraphy. In this context, the development of phylogenetic nomenclature (PN) and the recent advent of the PhyloCode appear as the logical outcome of the development of evolutionary biology and phylogenetics.

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“…Armand Leroi is also one of those researchers who have attempted to reproduce Aristotle's dissections experimentally, as did Christopher Cosans, who also tried to do so in the late Nineties (Cosans 1998) – although he performed his experiences on previously prepared anatomical parts in the laboratory, under conditions that were therefore considerably different from those encountered by Aristotle – or Alexander Fürst von Lieven, Marcel Humar and Gerhard Scholtz in Berlin, who attempted to reconstruct the Anatomai by using an interdisciplinary collaborative approach (Fürst von Lieven et al 2021).…”

Section: Re-enacting Aristotle's Dissections Redrawing Aristotle's Di...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Anatomies of Aristotle's Anatomai

Carbone

2023

Anthropozoologica

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My aim here is to explore the critical and methodological issues involved in a potential reconstruction of the Anatomai, based on the underlying assumption that such a reconstruction should be based on an examination of the texts and contexts in which Aristotle refers to the Anatomai and the role he ascribes to them in the enquiry into differences and causes in biology. I critically discuss Aristotle's references to dissection experiments by comparing them with references to anatomical representations in an attempt to show that in Aristotle's eyes the scientific value of pictorial evidence is not inferior to the direct experience of dissection but may indeed have epistemological priority. Aristotle's reference to actual dissection experiments often refers to extremely simple procedures. This simplicity seems incompatible with the complexity of the anatomical techniques required to obtain the amount and accuracy of detail that Aristotle seems to gather from the anatomical drawings of the Anatomai. On the other hand, Aristotle tends to focus in his anatomical experiments on a few distinctive parts of animals. It thus seems unlikely that the Anatomai could have presented an encyclopaedic account of comparative anatomy. To account for this cleavage between anatomical experimentation and morphological representation, I attempt to describe Aristotle's approach by distinguishing between an anatomy of the "what" and an anatomy of the "why". RÉSUMÉ Anatomies des Anatomai d'Aristote.Mon objectif est d'explorer les questions critiques et méthodologiques liées à la reconstruction éventuelle des Anatomai, en partant de l'hypothèse qu'une telle reconstruction devrait se fonder sur un examen des textes et des contextes dans lesquels Aristote fait référence aux Anatomai et au rôle qu'il leur attribue dans l'enquête sur les différences et les causes en biologie. Je discute de manière critique les références faites par Aristote aux expériences de dissection, en les comparant aux références qu'il fait aux représentations anatomiques dans le but de montrer qu'aux yeux d'Aristote la valeur scientifique des preuves imagées n'est pas inférieure à l'expérience directe de la dissection, et qu'elle peut même avoir une priorité épistémologique. Les allusions d'Aristote à des expériences de dissection proprement dites évoquent souvent des procédures extrêmement simples. Cette simplicité semble incompatible avec la complexité des techniques anatomiques requises pour obtenir la quantité et la précision de détails qu'Aristote semble tirer des dessins anatomiques des Anatomai. D'autre part, Aristote a tendance à se concentrer, dans ses expériences anatomiques, sur un petit nombre de parties distinctives des animaux. Il semble donc peu probable que les Anatomai aient pu présenter un compte rendu encyclopédique de l'anatomie comparée. Pour rendre compte de ce clivage entre l'expérimentation anatomique et la représentation morphologique, je tente de décrire l'approche d'Aristote en établissant une distinction entre une anatomie du « quoi » et une ...

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Aristotle’s lobster: the image in the text

Cited by 4 publications

References 16 publications

Phylogenetic signal in characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

Phylogenetic signal in characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

ThePhyloCode: The logical outcome of millennia of evolution of biological nomenclature?

Anatomies of Aristotle's Anatomai

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