82-455: Crossosomataceae is a small plant family, consisting of four genera of shrubs found only in the dry parts of the American southwest and Mexico . This family has included up to ten species in the past, although as of 2021 six species are still recognised. Crossosoma are shrub -like plants which can vary from being 50 cm to 5 meters tall, with small alternating leaves that surround
164-476: A cartilage for example was the same all the way through, not subdivided into atoms as Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 BC) had argued. The uniform parts can be arranged on a scale of Aristotelian qualities, from the coldest and driest, such as hair, to the hottest and wettest, such as milk. At each stage of metabolism, residual materials are excreted as faeces, urine, and bile. Aristotle's account of temperature regulation sought to explain how an animal maintained
246-403: A distinct group, of over 50 kinds. The egg-bearing tetrapods, Ōiotoka tetrapoda ( reptiles and amphibians ) had blood and four legs, but were cold and laid eggs, so were a distinct group. The snakes , Opheis , similarly had blood, but no legs, and laid dry eggs, so were a separate group. The fishes , Ikhthyes , had blood but no legs, and laid wet eggs, forming a definite group. Among them,
328-518: A hundred animals, and dissected around 35 of these. Aristotle's writings on biology, the first in the history of science , are scattered across several books, forming about a quarter of his writings that have survived . The main biology texts were the History of Animals , Generation of Animals , Movement of Animals , Progression of Animals , Parts of Animals , and On the Soul , as well as
410-544: A longer period of gestation, and are heavier. As a final example, fecundity decreases with lifespan, so long-lived kinds like elephants have fewer young in total than short-lived kinds like mice. Aristotle's use of explanation has been considered "fundamentally unscientific". The French playwright Molière 's 1673 play The Imaginary Invalid portrays the quack Aristotelian doctor Argan blandly explaining that opium causes sleep by virtue of its dormitive [sleep-making] principle , its virtus dormitiva . Argan's explanation
492-405: A new area, with systematic data collection, discovery of patterns, and inference of possible causal explanations from these. He did not perform experiments in the modern sense, but made observations of living animals and carried out dissections. He names some 500 species of bird, mammal, and fish; and he distinguishes dozens of insects and other invertebrates. He describes the internal anatomy of over
574-551: A protective response. The first such plant receptors were identified in rice and in Arabidopsis thaliana . Plants have some of the largest genomes of all organisms. The largest plant genome (in terms of gene number) is that of wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), predicted to encode ≈94,000 genes and thus almost 5 times as many as the human genome . The first plant genome sequenced was that of Arabidopsis thaliana which encodes about 25,500 genes. In terms of sheer DNA sequence,
656-420: A range of physical and biotic stresses which cause DNA damage , but they can tolerate and repair much of this damage. Plants reproduce to generate offspring, whether sexually , involving gametes , or asexually , involving ordinary growth. Many plants use both mechanisms. When reproducing sexually, plants have complex lifecycles involving alternation of generations . One generation, the sporophyte , which
738-466: A steady temperature and the continued oscillation of the thorax needed for breathing. The system of regulation of temperature and breathing described in Youth and Old Age, Life and Death 26 is sufficiently detailed to permit modelling as a negative feedback control system (one that maintains a desired property by opposing disturbances to it), with a few assumptions such as a desired temperature to compare
820-761: A theory of Empedocles, that the vertebral column is divided into vertebrae because, as it happens, the embryo twists about and snaps the column into pieces, is wrong. Aristotle argues instead that the process has a predefined goal: that the "seed" that develops into the embryo began with an inbuilt "potential" to become specific body parts, such as vertebrae. Further, each sort of animal gives rise to animals of its own kind: humans only have human babies. Aristotle has been called unscientific by philosophers from Francis Bacon onwards for at least two reasons: his scientific style, and his use of explanation . His explanations are in turn made cryptic by his complicated system of causes . However, these charges need to be considered in
902-404: Is diploid (with 2 sets of chromosomes ), gives rise to the next generation, the gametophyte , which is haploid (with one set of chromosomes). Some plants also reproduce asexually via spores . In some non-flowering plants such as mosses, the sexual gametophyte forms most of the visible plant. In seed plants (gymnosperms and flowering plants), the sporophyte forms most of the visible plant, and
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#1732772181367984-547: Is a similar process. Structures such as runners enable plants to grow to cover an area, forming a clone . Many plants grow food storage structures such as tubers or bulbs which may each develop into a new plant. Some non-flowering plants, such as many liverworts, mosses and some clubmosses, along with a few flowering plants, grow small clumps of cells called gemmae which can detach and grow. Plants use pattern-recognition receptors to recognize pathogens such as bacteria that cause plant diseases. This recognition triggers
1066-491: Is at best empty (devoid of mechanism), at worst vitalist . But the real Aristotle did provide biological mechanisms , in the form of the five processes of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, embryonic development, and inheritance that he developed. Further, he provided mechanical, non-vitalist analogies for these theories, mentioning bellows , toy carts, the movement of water through porous pots, and even automatic puppets. Readers of Aristotle have found
1148-421: Is common in modern biology when large amounts of data become available in a new field, such as genomics . It does not result in the same certainty as experimental science, but it sets out testable hypotheses and constructs a narrative explanation of what is observed. In this sense, Aristotle's biology is scientific. From the data he collected and documented, Aristotle inferred quite a number of rules relating
1230-483: Is excreted as urine, bile, and faeces, and the element fire is released as heat. Blood is made into flesh, the rest forming other earthy tissues such as bones, teeth, cartilages and sinews. Leftover blood is made into fat , whether soft suet or hard lard. Some fat from all around the body is made into semen . All the tissues are in Aristotle's view completely uniform parts with no internal structure of any kind;
1312-496: Is known as botany , a branch of biology . All living things were traditionally placed into one of two groups, plants and animals . This classification dates from Aristotle (384–322 BC), who distinguished different levels of beings in his biology , based on whether living things had a "sensitive soul" or like plants only a "vegetative soul". Theophrastus , Aristotle's student, continued his work in plant taxonomy and classification. Much later, Linnaeus (1707–1778) created
1394-454: Is markedly unlike Plato 's theory of Forms . The theory describes five major biological processes, namely metabolism , temperature regulation , information processing, embryogenesis , and inheritance . Each was defined in some detail, in some cases sufficient to enable modern biologists to create mathematical models of the mechanisms described. Aristotle's method, too, resembled the style of science used by modern biologists when exploring
1476-417: Is possible given extra assumptions such as of delays or non-linear responses. Aristotle's information processing model has been named the "centralized incoming and outgoing motions model". It sought to explain how changes in the world led to appropriate behaviour in the animal. The system worked as follows. The animal's sense organ is altered when it detects an object. This causes a perceptual change in
1558-574: 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 Kalloni . His theory is based on his concept of form , which derives from but
1640-634: The Antarctic flora , consisting of algae, mosses, liverworts, lichens, and just two flowering plants, have adapted to the prevailing conditions on that southern continent. Plants are often the dominant physical and structural component of the habitats where they occur. Many of the Earth's biomes are named for the type of vegetation because plants are the dominant organisms in those biomes, such as grassland , savanna , and tropical rainforest . Aristotle%27s biology#Classification Aristotle's biology
1722-706: The Cretaceous so rapid that Darwin called it an " abominable mystery ". Conifers diversified from the Late Triassic onwards, and became a dominant part of floras in the Jurassic . In 2019, a phylogeny based on genomes and transcriptomes from 1,153 plant species was proposed. The placing of algal groups is supported by phylogenies based on genomes from the Mesostigmatophyceae and Chlorokybophyceae that have since been sequenced. Both
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#17327721813671804-550: The Hippocratic model which was continuous and blending . The child's sex can be influenced by factors that affect temperature, including the weather, the wind direction, diet, and the father's age. Features other than sex also depend on whether the semen overpowers the menses, so if a man has strong semen, he will have sons who resemble him, while if the semen is weak, he will have daughters who resemble their mother. Aristotle's model of embryogenesis sought to explain how
1886-510: The Lycaeum , where he taught for the last dozen years of his life. His writings on zoology form about a quarter of his surviving work. Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus later wrote a similar book on botany , Enquiry into Plants . Aristotle's biology is constructed on the basis of his theory of form , which is derived from Plato's theory of Forms , but significantly different from it. Plato's Forms were eternal and fixed, being "blueprints in
1968-536: The Ptolemies that advances in biology resumed. The first medical teacher at Alexandria, Herophilus of Chalcedon , corrected Aristotle, placing intelligence in the brain , and connected the nervous system to motion and sensation. Herophilus also distinguished between veins and arteries , noting that the latter pulse while the former do not. Many classical works including those of Aristotle were transmitted from Greek to Syriac, then to Arabic, then to Latin in
2050-542: The Pyrrha lagoon in the centre of Lesbos. His data are assembled from his own observations, statements given by people with specialised knowledge such as beekeepers and fishermen , and less accurate accounts provided by travellers from overseas. His observations on catfish , electric fish ( Torpedo ) and angler fish are detailed, as is his writing on cephalopods including the octopus , cuttlefish and paper nautilus . He reported that fishermen had asserted that
2132-457: The carpels or ovaries , which develop into fruits that contain seeds . Fruits may be dispersed whole, or they may split open and the seeds dispersed individually. Plants reproduce asexually by growing any of a wide variety of structures capable of growing into new plants. At the simplest, plants such as mosses or liverworts may be broken into pieces, each of which may regrow into whole plants. The propagation of flowering plants by cuttings
2214-567: The eukaryotes that form the kingdom Plantae ; they are predominantly photosynthetic . This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight , using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars from carbon dioxide and water, using the green pigment chlorophyll . Exceptions are parasitic plants that have lost the genes for chlorophyll and photosynthesis, and obtain their energy from other plants or fungi. Most plants are multicellular , except for some green algae. Historically, as in Aristotle's biology ,
2296-420: The four causes that he uses in his biological explanations opaque, something not helped by many centuries of confused exegesis . For a biological system, these are however straightforward enough. The material cause is simply what a system is constructed from. The goal ( final cause ) and formal cause are what something is for , its function : to a modern biologist, such teleology describes adaptation under
2378-436: The mammals ), being warm, having four legs, and giving birth to their young. The cetaceans , Kētōdē , also had blood and gave birth to live young, but did not have legs, and therefore formed a separate group ( megista genē , defined by a set of functioning "parts" ). The birds, Ornithes had blood and laid eggs, but had only 2 legs and were a distinct form ( eidos ) with feathers and beaks instead of teeth, so they too formed
2460-466: The natural history of the island of Lesbos , where he spent about two years, and the marine life in the seas around it, especially of the Pyrrha lagoon in the island's centre. This study made him the earliest scientist whose written work survives. No similarly detailed work on zoology was attempted until the sixteenth century; accordingly Aristotle remained highly influential for some two thousand years. He returned to Athens and founded his own school,
2542-552: The sea anemone was in its "own group". Aristotle stated in the History of Animals that all beings were arranged in a fixed scale of perfection, reflected in their form ( eidos ). They stretched from minerals to plants and animals, and on up to man, forming the scala naturae or great chain of being . His system had eleven grades, arranged according to the potentiality of each being, expressed in their form at birth. The highest animals gave birth to warm and wet creatures alive,
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2624-1003: The "chlorophyte algae" and the "streptophyte algae" are treated as paraphyletic (vertical bars beside phylogenetic tree diagram) in this analysis, as the land plants arose from within those groups. The classification of Bryophyta is supported both by Puttick et al. 2018, and by phylogenies involving the hornwort genomes that have also since been sequenced. Rhodophyta [REDACTED] Glaucophyta [REDACTED] Chlorophyta [REDACTED] Prasinococcales Mesostigmatophyceae Chlorokybophyceae Spirotaenia [REDACTED] Klebsormidiales [REDACTED] Chara [REDACTED] Coleochaetales [REDACTED] Hornworts [REDACTED] Liverworts [REDACTED] Mosses [REDACTED] Lycophytes [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Gymnosperms [REDACTED] Angiosperms [REDACTED] Plant cells have distinctive features that other eukaryotic cells (such as those of animals) lack. These include
2706-474: The 13th century, Thomas Aquinas merged Aristotle's metaphysics with Christian theology. Whereas Albert had treated Aristotle's biology as science, writing that experiment was the only safe guide and joining in with the types of observation that Aristotle had made, Aquinas saw Aristotle purely as theory, and Aristotelian thought became associated with scholasticism . The scholastic natural philosophy curriculum omitted most of Aristotle's biology, but included On
2788-639: The Middle Ages. Aristotle remained the principal authority in biology for the next two thousand years. The Kitāb al-Hayawān (كتاب الحيوان, Book of Animals ) is a 9th-century Arabic translation of History of Animals : 1–10, On the Parts of Animals : 11–14, and Generation of Animals : 15–19. The book was mentioned by Al-Kindī (d. 850), and commented on by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) in his Kitāb al-Šifā (کتاب الشفاء, The Book of Healing ). Avempace (Ibn Bājja) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) commented on On
2870-806: The Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals , Averroes criticising Avempace's interpretations. When the Christian Alfonso VI of Castile retook the Kingdom of Toledo from the Moors in 1085, an Arabic translation of Aristotle's works, with commentaries by Avicenna and Averroes emerged into European medieval scholarship. Michael Scot translated much of Aristotle's biology into Latin, c. 1225, along with many of Averroes's commentaries. Albertus Magnus commented extensively on Aristotle, but added his own zoological observations and an encyclopedia of animals based on Thomas of Cantimpré . Later in
2952-471: The Soul . Renaissance zoologists made use of Aristotle's zoology in two ways. Especially in Italy, scholars such as Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo lectured and wrote commentaries on Aristotle. Elsewhere, authors used Aristotle as one of their sources, alongside their own and their colleagues' observations, to create new encyclopedias such as Konrad Gessner 's 1551 Historia Animalium . The title and
3034-864: The Viridiplantae, along with the red algae and the glaucophytes , in the clade Archaeplastida . There are about 380,000 known species of plants, of which the majority, some 260,000, produce seeds . They range in size from single cells to the tallest trees . Green plants provide a substantial proportion of the world's molecular oxygen; the sugars they create supply the energy for most of Earth's ecosystems and other organisms , including animals, either eat plants directly or rely on organisms which do so. Grain , fruit , and vegetables are basic human foods and have been domesticated for millennia. People use plants for many purposes , such as building materials , ornaments, writing materials , and, in great variety, for medicines . The scientific study of plants
3116-406: The actual temperature against. The system worked as follows. Heat is constantly lost from the body. Food products reach the heart and are processed into new blood, releasing fire during metabolism, which raises the blood temperature too high. That raises the heart temperature, causing lung volume to increase, in turn raising the airflow at the mouth. The cool air brought in through the mouth reduces
3198-801: The amount of cytoplasm stays the same. Most plants are multicellular . Plant cells differentiate into multiple cell types, forming tissues such as the vascular tissue with specialized xylem and phloem of leaf veins and stems , and organs with different physiological functions such as roots to absorb water and minerals, stems for support and to transport water and synthesized molecules, leaves for photosynthesis, and flowers for reproduction. Plants photosynthesize , manufacturing food molecules ( sugars ) using energy obtained from light . Plant cells contain chlorophylls inside their chloroplasts, which are green pigments that are used to capture light energy. The end-to-end chemical equation for photosynthesis is: This causes plants to release oxygen into
3280-438: The animal and was thus purely biological. Different types of organism possessed different types of soul. Plants had a vegetative soul, responsible for reproduction and growth. Animals had both a vegetative and a sensitive soul, responsible for mobility and sensation. Humans, uniquely, had a vegetative, a sensitive, and a rational soul, capable of thought and reflection. Aristotle's account of metabolism sought to explain how food
3362-417: The animal's seat of sensation , which Aristotle believed was the heart ( cardiocentrism ) rather than the brain . This in turn causes a change in the heart's heat, which causes a quantitative change sufficient to make the heart transmit a mechanical impulse to a limb, which moves, moving the animal's body. The alteration in the heat of the heart also causes a change in the consistency of the joints, which helps
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3444-431: The atmosphere. Green plants provide a substantial proportion of the world's molecular oxygen, alongside the contributions from photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria. Plants that have secondarily adopted a parasitic lifestyle may lose the genes involved in photosynthesis and the production of chlorophyll. Growth is determined by the interaction of a plant's genome with its physical and biotic environment. Factors of
3526-467: The basis of the modern system of scientific classification , but retained the animal and plant kingdoms , naming the plant kingdom the Vegetabilia. When the name Plantae or plant is applied to a specific group of organisms or taxa , it usually refers to one of four concepts. From least to most inclusive, these four groupings are: There are about 382,000 accepted species of plants, of which
3608-416: The child, subject to influence from the environment. The system worked as follows. The father's semen and the mother's menses have movements that encode their parental characteristics. The model is partly asymmetric, as only the father's movements define the form or eidos of the species, while the movements of both the father's and the mother's uniform parts define features other than the form, such as
3690-614: The cold, dry, nearly mineral eggs of birds. However, Aristotle is careful never to insist that a group fits perfectly in the scale; he knows animals have many combinations of attributes, and that placements are approximate. Aristotle's pupil and successor at the Lyceum , Theophrastus , wrote the History of Plants , the first classical book of botany . It has an Aristotelian structure, but rather than focus on formal causes, as Aristotle did, Theophrastus described how plants functioned. Where Aristotle expanded on grand theories, Theophrastus
3772-488: The development of forests in swampy environments dominated by clubmosses and horsetails, including some as large as trees, and the appearance of early gymnosperms , the first seed plants . The Permo-Triassic extinction event radically changed the structures of communities. This may have set the scene for the evolution of flowering plants in the Triassic (~ 200 million years ago ), with an adaptive radiation in
3854-583: The enemy of true science into the 20th century. Leroi noted that in 1985, Peter Medawar stated in "pure seventeenth century" tones that Aristotle had assembled "a strange and generally speaking rather tiresome farrago of hearsay , imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility". Zoologists working in the 19th century, including Georges Cuvier , Johannes Peter Müller , and Louis Agassiz admired Aristotle's biology and investigated some of his observations. D'Arcy Thompson translated History of Animals in 1910, making
3936-463: The father's eye colour or the mother's nose shape. Aristotle's theory has some symmetry, as semen movements carry maleness while the menses carry femaleness. If the semen is hot enough to overpower the cold menses, the child will be a boy; but if it is too cold to do this, the child will be a girl. Inheritance is thus particulate (definitely one trait or another), as in Mendelian genetics , unlike
4018-409: The gametophyte is very small. Flowering plants reproduce sexually using flowers, which contain male and female parts: these may be within the same ( hermaphrodite ) flower, on different flowers on the same plant , or on different plants . The stamens create pollen , which produces male gametes that enter the ovule to fertilize the egg cell of the female gametophyte. Fertilization takes place within
4100-583: The great majority, some 283,000, produce seeds . The table below shows some species count estimates of different green plant (Viridiplantae) divisions . About 85–90% of all plants are flowering plants. Several projects are currently attempting to collect records on all plant species in online databases, e.g. the World Flora Online . Plants range in scale from single-celled organisms such as desmids (from 10 micrometres (μm) across) and picozoa (less than 3 μm across), to
4182-414: The group he called Selachē (roughly, the modern zoologist's selachians ). Among many other things, he gave accurate descriptions of the four-chambered stomachs of ruminants , and of the ovoviviparous embryological development of the dogfish . His accounts of about 35 animals are sufficiently detailed to convince biologists that he dissected those species, indeed vivisecting some; he mentions
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#17327721813674264-413: The heart appear; this is vital, as the heart nourishes all other organs. Aristotle observed that the heart is the first organ seen to be active (beating) in a hen's egg. The pneuma then makes the other organs develop. Aristotle asserts in his Physics that according to Empedocles , order "spontaneously" appears in the developing embryo. In The Parts of Animals , he argues that what he describes as
4346-464: The heart temperature, so the lung volume accordingly decreases, restoring the temperature to normal. The mechanism only works if the air is cooler than the reference temperature. If the air is hotter than that, the system becomes a positive feedback cycle, the body's fire is put out, and death follows. The system as described damps out fluctuations in temperature. Aristotle however predicted that his system would cause lung oscillation (breathing), which
4428-472: The informational nature of form by arguing that a body is compounded of elements like earth and fire, just as a word is compounded of letters in a specific order. As analysed by the evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi , Aristotle's biology included five major interlocking processes : The five processes formed what Aristotle called the soul : it was not something extra, but the system consisting exactly of these mechanisms. The Aristotelian soul died with
4510-429: The inherited parental characteristics cause the formation and development of an embryo. The system worked as follows. First, the father's semen curdles the mother's menses, which Aristotle compares with how rennet (an enzyme from a cow's stomach) curdles milk in cheesemaking . This forms the embryo; it is then developed by the action of the pneuma (literally, breath or spirit) in the semen. The pneuma first makes
4592-443: The internal anatomy of roughly 110 animals in total. Aristotle distinguished about 500 species of birds, mammals, actinopterygians and selachians in History of Animals and Parts of Animals . Aristotle distinguished animals with blood, Enhaima (the modern zoologist's vertebrates ) and animals without blood, Anhaima ( invertebrates ). Animals with blood included live-bearing tetrapods, Zōiotoka tetrapoda (roughly,
4674-423: The kind of animal called a bird has feathers, a beak, wings, a hard-shelled egg, and warm blood. Aristotle further noted that there are many bird forms within the bird kind – cranes , eagles , crows , bustards , sparrows , and so on, just as there are many forms of fishes within the fish kind. He sometimes called these atoma eidē , indivisible forms. Human is one of these indivisible forms: Socrates and
4756-529: The land 1,200 million years ago , but it was not until the Ordovician , around 450 million years ago , that the first land plants appeared, with a level of organisation like that of bryophytes. However, fossils of organisms with a flattened thallus in Precambrian rocks suggest that multicellular freshwater eukaryotes existed over 1000 mya. Primitive land plants began to diversify in
4838-412: The large water-filled central vacuole , chloroplasts , and the strong flexible cell wall , which is outside the cell membrane . Chloroplasts are derived from what was once a symbiosis of a non-photosynthetic cell and photosynthetic cyanobacteria . The cell wall, made mostly of cellulose , allows plant cells to swell up with water without bursting. The vacuole allows the cell to change in size while
4920-515: The largest trees ( megaflora ) such as the conifer Sequoia sempervirens (up to 120 metres (380 ft) tall) and the angiosperm Eucalyptus regnans (up to 100 m (325 ft) tall). The naming of plants is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants and the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants . The ancestors of land plants evolved in water. An algal scum formed on
5002-665: The late Silurian , around 420 million years ago . Bryophytes, club mosses, and ferns then appear in the fossil record. Early plant anatomy is preserved in cellular detail in an early Devonian fossil assemblage from the Rhynie chert . These early plants were preserved by being petrified in chert formed in silica-rich volcanic hot springs. By the end of the Devonian, most of the basic features of plants today were present, including roots, leaves and secondary wood in trees such as Archaeopteris . The Carboniferous period saw
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#17327721813675084-401: The life-history features of the live-bearing tetrapods (terrestrial placental mammals ) that he studied. Among these correct predictions are the following. Brood size decreases with (adult) body mass, so that an elephant has fewer young (usually just one) per brood than a mouse . Lifespan increases with gestation period , and also with body mass, so that elephants live longer than mice, have
5166-593: The light of what was known in his own time. His systematic gathering of data, too, is obscured by the lack of modern methods of presentation, such as tables of data: for example, the whole of History of Animals Book VI is taken up with a list of observations of the life histories of birds that "would now be summarized in a single table in Nature – and in the Online Supplementary Information at that". Aristotle did not do experiments in
5248-400: The limb to move. There is thus a causal chain which transmits information from a sense organ to an organ capable of making decisions, and onwards to a motor organ. In this respect, the model is analogous to a modern understanding of information processing such as in sensory-motor coupling . Aristotle's inheritance model sought to explain how the parents' characteristics are transmitted to
5330-574: The lost drawings of The Anatomies which accompanied the History . Apart from his pupil, Theophrastus , who wrote a matching Enquiry into Plants , no research of comparable scope was carried out in ancient Greece , though Hellenistic medicine in Egypt continued Aristotle's inquiry into the mechanisms of the human body. Aristotle's biology was influential in the medieval Islamic world. Translation of Arabic versions and commentaries into Latin brought knowledge of Aristotle back into Western Europe, but
5412-410: The lowest bore theirs cold, dry, and in thick eggs. The system was based on Aristotle's interpretation of the four elements in his On Generation and Corruption : Fire (hot and dry); Air (hot and wet); Water (cold and wet); and Earth (cold and dry). These are arranged from the most energetic to the least, so the warm, wet young raised in a womb with a placenta were higher on the scale than
5494-468: The mind of God". Real things in the world could, in Plato's view, at best be approximations to these perfect Forms. Aristotle heard Plato's view and developed it into a set of three biological concepts. He uses the same Greek word, εἶδος ( eidos ), to mean first of all the set of visible features that uniquely characterised a kind of animal. Aristotle used the word γένος (génos) to mean a kind. For example,
5576-546: The modern sense. He used the ancient Greek term pepeiramenoi to mean observations, or at most investigative procedures, such as (in Generation of Animals ) finding a fertilised hen's egg of a suitable stage and opening it so as to be able to see the embryo's heart inside. Instead, he practised a different style of science: systematically gathering data, discovering patterns common to whole groups of animals, and inferring possible causal explanations from these. This style
5658-420: The octopus’s hectocotyl arm was used in sexual reproduction. He admitted its use in mating 'only for the sake of attachment', but rejected the idea that it was useful for generation, since "it is outside the passage and indeed outside the body". In the 19th century, biologists found that the reported function was correct. He separated the aquatic mammals from fish, and knew that sharks and rays were part of
5740-806: The only biological work widely taught in medieval universities was On the Soul . The association of his work with medieval scholasticism , as well as errors in his theories, caused Early Modern scientists such as Galileo and William Harvey to reject Aristotle. Criticism of his errors and secondhand reports continued for centuries. He has found better acceptance among zoologists , and some of his long-derided observations in marine biology have been found in modern times to be true. Aristotle (384–322 BC) studied at Plato's Academy in Athens , remaining there for about 20 years. Like Plato , he sought universals in his philosophy , but unlike Plato he backed up his views with detailed and systematic observation, notably of
5822-425: The parents' seeds, which combine. These seeds thus contain form, or in modern terms information. Aristotle makes clear that he sometimes intends this third sense by giving the analogy of a woodcarving . It takes its form from wood (its material cause); the tools and carving technique used to make it (its efficient cause); and the design laid out for it (its eidos or embedded information). Aristotle further emphasises
5904-481: The philosophical approach were Aristotelian, but the work was largely new. Edward Wotton similarly helped to found modern zoology by arranging the animals according to Aristotle's theories, separating out folklore from his 1552 De differentiis animalium . Aristotle's system of classification had thus remained influential for many centuries. In the Early Modern period, Aristotle came to represent all that
5986-501: The physical or abiotic environment include temperature , water , light, carbon dioxide , and nutrients in the soil. Biotic factors that affect plant growth include crowding, grazing, beneficial symbiotic bacteria and fungi, and attacks by insects or plant diseases . Frost and dehydration can damage or kill plants. Some plants have antifreeze proteins , heat-shock proteins and sugars in their cytoplasm that enable them to tolerate these stresses . Plants are continuously exposed to
6068-538: The plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals , and included algae and fungi . Definitions have narrowed since then; current definitions exclude the fungi and some of the algae. By the definition used in this article, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (green plants), which consists of the green algae and the embryophytes or land plants ( hornworts , liverworts , mosses , lycophytes , ferns , conifers and other gymnosperms , and flowering plants ). A definition based on genomes includes
6150-431: The pressure of natural selection . The efficient cause is how a system develops and moves: to a modern biologist, those are explained by developmental biology and physiology . Biologists continue to offer explanations of these same kinds . Aristotle was the first person to study biology systematically. He spent two years observing and describing the zoology of Lesbos and the surrounding seas, including in particular
6232-409: The rest of us are all different individually, but we all have human form. More recent studies have shown that Aristotle used the terms γένος (génos) and εἶδος ( eidos ) in a relative way. A taxon that is considered an eidos in one context can be considered a génos (which includes various eide ) in another. Finally, Aristotle observed that the child does not take just any form, but is given it by
6314-659: The selachians Selakhē (sharks and rays), had cartilages instead of bones and were viviparous (Aristotle did not know that some selachians are oviparous). Animals without blood were divided into soft-shelled Malakostraka ( crabs , lobsters , and shrimps ); hard-shelled Ostrakoderma ( gastropods and bivalves ); soft-bodied Malakia ( cephalopods ); and divisible animals Entoma ( insects , spiders , scorpions , ticks ). Other animals without blood included fish lice , hermit crabs , red coral , sea anemones , sponges , starfish and various worms: Aristotle did not classify these into groups, although Aristotle mentioned that
6396-469: The smallest published genome is that of the carnivorous bladderwort ( Utricularia gibba) at 82 Mb (although it still encodes 28,500 genes) while the largest, from the Norway spruce ( Picea abies ), extends over 19.6 Gb (encoding about 28,300 genes). Plants are distributed almost worldwide. While they inhabit several biomes which can be divided into a multitude of ecoregions , only the hardy plants of
6478-487: The stem, or leaves clustered in small spurts (fascicles). Apacheria , however, has opposite leaves. Crossosoma has usually white flowers that are generally bisexual and have 5 petals attached to a nectary disk, but in Velascoa the flowers are campanulate and have an extremely reduced nectary disk. This rosid article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Plant See text Plants are
6560-496: Was obsolete, scholastic, and wrong, not helped by his association with medieval theology. In 1632, Galileo represented Aristotelianism in his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) by the strawman Simplicio ("Simpleton" ). That same year, William Harvey proved Aristotle wrong by demonstrating that blood circulates . Aristotle still represented
6642-451: Was processed by the body to provide both heat and the materials for the body's construction and maintenance. The metabolic system for live-bearing tetrapods described in the Parts of Animals can be modelled as an open system , a branching tree of flows of material through the body. The system worked as follows. The incoming material, food, enters the body and is concocted into blood; waste
6724-399: Was quietly empirical. Where Aristotle insisted that species have a fixed place on the scala naturae , Theophrastus suggests that one kind of plant can transform into another, as when a field sown to wheat turns to the weed darnel . After Theophrastus, though interest in Aristotle's ideas survived, they were generally taken unquestioningly. It is not until the age of Alexandria under
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