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Aristotle's biology is the theory of biology, grounded in systematic observation and collection of data, mainly zoological, embodied in Aristotle's books on the science. Many of his observations were made during his stay on the island of Lesbos , including especially his descriptions of the marine biology of the Pyrrha lagoon, now the Gulf of ...
Aristotle did not embrace either divine creation or evolution, instead arguing in his biology that each species (eidos) was immutable, breeding true to its ideal eternal form (not the same as Plato's theory of forms). [3] [4] Aristotle's suggestion in De Generatione Animalium of a fixed hierarchy in nature - a scala naturae ("ladder of nature ...
On Generation and Corruption (Ancient Greek: Περὶ γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς; Latin: De Generatione et Corruptione), also known as On Coming to Be and Passing Away is a treatise by Aristotle. Like many of his texts, it is both scientific, part of Aristotle's biology, and philosophic.
More generally, Aristotle's biology, described across the five books sometimes called On Animals and some of his minor works, the Parva Naturalia, defines what in modern terms is a set of models of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, inheritance, and embryogenesis.
Generation of Animals consists of five books, which are themselves split into varying numbers of chapters. Most editions of this work categorise it with Bekker numbers.In general, each book covers a range of related topics, however there is also a significant amount of overlap in the content of the books.
Another common term at that time was the theory of evolution, although "evolution" (in the sense of development as a pure growth process) had a completely different meaning than today. The preformists assumed that the entire organism was preformed in the sperm (animalkulism) or in the egg (ovism or ovulism) and only had to unfold and grow.
Aristotle drew an analogy between the "foamy matter" (τὸ ἀφρῶδες, to aphrodes) found in nature and the "seed" of an animal, which he viewed as being a kind of foam itself (composed, as it was, from a mixture of water and pneuma). For Aristotle, the generative materials of male and female animals (semen and menstrual fluid) were ...
The theory held that "lower" animals are generated by decaying organic substances. Aristotle stated that, for example, aphids arise from dew on plants, flies from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, and crocodiles from rotting sunken logs. [16] The basic idea was that life was continuously created as a result of chance events. [17]