By Alex McBirney, Stanton Cook
This long-overlooked survey of the improvement of evolutionary concept is through a long way the main thorough and balanced account of its type. in contrast to lots of the contemporary Anglo-centric literature that has a tendency to concentration virtually solely on Darwin and typical choice, it follows the paintings of naturalists of many nationalities who used paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology that allows you to identify a linear continuity of evolving existence notwithstanding the lengthy span of geological time.
Read Online or Download The Philosophy of Zoology Before Darwin: A translated and annotated version of the original French text by Edmond Perrier PDF
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Additional info for The Philosophy of Zoology Before Darwin: A translated and annotated version of the original French text by Edmond Perrier
Example text
He thought that those forces were most important during Earth’s early period of exuberant productivity when the malformations [monstrosities] it produced would disappear almost immediately. Today, he argued, this natural process no longer has an effect. Although he employed words like corda or sæcla to designate species in terms that implied a continuous series, he does not seem to have believed that an intermediary was needed between the common mother and its first children. In short, it does not seem to have occurred to him that the forms living today might not be immutable.
To him, everything in nature appeared to be rigorously ordered. He was convinced that all creatures are related in a logical fashion, much as our thoughts are linked to one another in an uninterrupted chain. Chapter V 30 He was also in accord with the aphorism that Leibnitz had stated: Natura non facit saltum – Nature never moves by leaps. Each species in the long series of living forms should fit neatly between two others. Scientists should strive to place species in this kind of order, for only then can they be confident that their system of classification is definitive.
Some of these are of only passing interest, but several of those he laid out in his Natural History of Animals have been firmly incorporated into science exactly as Aristotle formulated them. What may be most marvelous of all is that, from the outset, Aristotle made use of all the different approaches by which the animal kingdom can and must be studied: comparative anatomy, physiology, embryology, animal behavior, geographical distribution, and the inter-relationships that these factors have with one another.
