Talk:History of Animals

Authorship of Book IX

The article on Bees informs us Book IX of Historia Animalium was not written by Aristotle, a claim in discordance with this article. There is no reference for that particular claim, and I don't have time to delve into scholarly disputes on that matter, but maybe someone who knows HA well enough can settle the discord. There might be confusion about the book number, as there seem to be references to bees in different books of HA. --Oop (talk) 10:28, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Book X is the spurious one; Book IX is not in doubt. I've removed the aside that makes the claim from Bees. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:42, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Further note on errors

I think the article would be incomplete without a note on some of the more basic errors. We deal well with the question of whether his actual observations are wrong, but we don't really deal with the more fundamental things that are just products of his time. In trying to get this effect across, I added this:

"There are also more egregious errors that can be attributed to the limits of observation or philosophy in Aristotle's time. For example, in Book I insects are said not to breathe air and later fig wasps are credited with spontaneous generation."

To this I might add all the phrenological elements I've found in Book I: "Straight eyebrows are a sign of softness of disposition... When men have large foreheads, they are slow to move; when they have small ones, they are fickle..."

However, this edit was — maybe rightly — reverted with the call for a citation rather than add to an already "fully cited" article.

Would citing the relevant passages in the book be sufficient, relying on public knowledge to supply the debunking, or would it require citing some scholar having written about these more basic falsehoods? Thanks. Flipping Mackerel (talk) 22:29, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest, and for inquiring. "Public knowledge" is unverifiable, so it fails WP:V. Citing the book itself (obviously WP:PRIMARY, to be used only to establish what the book says) cannot demonstrate anything on its own. So, yes, scholarship published in Reliable Sources is the only option.

"incomplete without a note on some of the more basic errors": the article already contains a section, "Apparent errors", on exactly this point, complete with examples.

I would caution that the article could readily become unbalanced by trying to list all or even a selection of what with fine 20/20 hindsight some might label as "errors": this is not a list and must not become one. More to the point, science, as invented by Aristotle, relies on making testable hypotheses, which may turn out to be falsified, but which will create further work and further hypotheses. This is not "error" but an essential component of the scientific method. Therefore, many philosophers of science would consider it a category error to identify "errors" in a scientist's published work. If that's not sufficient for you, consider that present-day textbooks will be full of statements that future scientists will know to have been falsified. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:18, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. Sure, it could be more accurate to call it by some name other than "error". But I think the section currently suggests that the work is entirely founded on observation, and mostly correct observation, especially by the fact that we currently have a rebuttal to each of the possible issues raised (implying by absence that there are no noteworthy issues without rebuttal — the title of the section also leads in this direction). I think it would improve the balance to mention that there are a number of things stated as fact that are not only incorrect but are either grounded in reasoning rather than observation, or grounded in incorrect observation.

Either way, you did make clear that I would need a source to cite if I want to add anything to that effect, so I'll leave it for now. Flipping Mackerel (talk) 20:38, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Definitely. I've added a small bit on models, with the caution that these aren't purely from the History, one reason I didn't do it before. A superseded model is a very different thing from an error, however. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:37, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Dogfish?

The article mentions that "Aristotle also noted that the young of the dogfish grow inside their mother's body attached by a cord to something like a placenta (a yolk sac)." It's cited by a link to this book, and yes, I found the claim in the book.

But...

Aristotle lived in ancient Greece. As far as I can tell, the dogfish (or "dusky smooth-hound") lives only around the eastern coast of the Americas. This fact seems to be corroborated by actual peer-reviewed studies. So... that book must be simply wrong, or this is some sort of identification error. Animals: From Mythology to Zoology explicitly names Mustelus canis (which, btw, the author wrote capitalizing both the genus and species names, which is not the accepted convention). The picture attached to this claim is not of a Mustelus canis embryo, it's a photograph of a Scyliorhinus retifer, aka the chain catshark, aka... the chain dogfish.

It would've been helpful had anyone bothered to actually cite the exact book/chapter this claim refers to. That Animals book doesn't provide any references. Bluegates11 (talk) 19:43, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

There are several small sharks named dogfish, and the US species certainly is not the one Aristotle saw. It is an error to assume that a colloquial name exactly denotes a single modern species. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:35, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

I managed to find Aristotle's original writing on this. It's in Book III of History of Animals. I'm gonna change the link but still, would've been nice if there was a better source for this claim. Bluegates11 (talk) 15:21, 15 July 2025 (UTC)