Why have people forgotten Aristotle’s contribution?
Up until the seventeenth century’s scientific revolution, when people spoke about biology they really spoke about Aristotle. His influence on early science was immense. It was so massive in fact that the science revolutionaries felt they had to destroy him during their attack on the old scientific system. Despite this the impact of Aristotle’s thought endures to this day. Even Darwin remarked: “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.” What we’re trying to do with this programme is recover Aristotle for biology. How did your new programme come about? Ten years ago I was on holiday in Greece. I walked into a second hand bookshop in Athens and bought a copy of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, or ‘History of Animals’. In the book’s preface the Scots biologist D’arcy Thompson claimed Aristotle did most of his biological work at a lagoon on the island of Lesvos. It just so happened that I was going to Lesvos any
