Phylogenetic signal in characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

Abstract

The influential Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) is almost unanimously acclaimed as the founder of zoology. There is a consensus that he was interested in attributes of animals, but whether or not he tried to develop a zoological taxonomy remains controversial. Fürst von Lieven and Humar compiled a data matrix from Aristotle’s Historia animalium and showed, through a parsimony analysis published in 2008, that these data produced a hierarchy that matched several taxa recognized by Aristotle. However, their analysis leaves some questions unanswered because random data can sometimes yield fairly resolved trees. In this study, we update the scores of many cells and add four new characters to the data matrix (147 taxa scored for 161 characters) and quote passages from Aristotle’s Historia animalium to justify these changes. We confirm the presence of a phylogenetic signal in these data through a test using skewness in length distribution of a million random trees, which shows that many of the characters discussed by Aristotle were systematically relevant. Our parsimony analyses on the updated matrix recover far more trees than reported by Fürst von Lieven and Humar, but their consensus includes many taxa that Aristotle recognized and apparently named for the first time, such as selachē (selachians) and dithyra (Bivalvia Linnaeus, 1758). This study suggests that even though taxonomy was obviously not Aristotle’s chief interest in Historia animalium, it was probably among his secondary interests. These results may pave the way for further taxonomic studies in Aristotle’s zoological writings in general. Despite being almost peripheral to Aristotle’s writings, his taxonomic contributions are clearly major achievements.

ThePhyloCode: The logical outcome of millennia of evolution of biological nomenclature?

“…Aristotle must have been a good naturalist, as he described fairly accurately many systematically relevant characters in various taxa. These data found in Aristotle's History of Animals can be used to score data matrices, which have been subjected to phylogenetic parsimony analysis in two studies (Fürst von Lieven & Humar, 2008; Laurin & Humar, 2022). In these studies, the trees were rooted using the sea anemone, known to Aristotle as akalēphē .…”

“…In these studies, the trees were rooted using the sea anemone, known to Aristotle as akalēphē . This obviates the need to polarize characters directly, though one might wonder if Aristotle's Scala naturae might be considered as a kind of pre‐evolutionary polarizing principle (Laurin & Humar, 2022: 14). These parsimony analyses found many taxa that Aristotle recognized, some of which are still valid, such as Selachii (mentioned above), but also Gnathostomata , Ruminantia , Diptera and Malacostraca , among others, which were named differently by Aristotle.…”