Evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi admits that most scientists don’t know much about history. The pity is that the history of science might promote humility through awareness of mistaken ideas passed once promoted as scientific—and because good science often stands on the work laid by predecessors.
In The Lagoon, Leroi explores science’s foundational if sometimes under-acknowledged figure, Aristotle. Nowadays the ancient Greek thinker pegged as a philosopher, but Aristotle didn’t place the study of the natural world in a cabinet separate from the study of the human condition. Leroi argues that Aristotle reached a turning point on the road to the scientific method by basing his ideas on direct observation and careful classification.
Of course, the great thinker got many things wrong—but also many things right. Unicorns crept into his zoology (they had been reported often enough by travelers in those days) but he cleaned up many misconceptions about the creatures he studied up close. Aristotle dissected animals to see how they were put together, and made trenchant observations about the physiological processes of living organisms.
Leroi titled his book after the lagoon on the island of Lesbos where Aristotle studied marine life; the author found that the ecosystem remains much the same today as it was 2,300 years ago. While admitting Aristotle’s errors, Leroi mounts a spirited and successful defense against some of the cruder attacks on Aristotelian science coming out of the European Enlightenment. To do so, Leroi addresses epistemology and the philosophy of science. Many edifices of knowledge have been erected on assumptions later proven false, yet have given humanity a meaningful picture of how the universe might operate. He also argues that Aristotle glimpsed truths that the mechanistic science of the 18th and 19th centuries was unable to see before developments in molecular biology and genetics. According to Leroi, Aristotle asserted the living things “cannot assemble willy-nilly but must be modeled on a pattern located elsewhere.” The pattern Aristotle sought turns out to be the code script of DNA.
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The Lagoon is a beautifully written book, elegantly illustrated with drawings of the species Aristotle encountered and providing a good introduction to an ancient philosopher whose writings can often seem forbiddingly difficult.
