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Aristotle's biology. Among Aristotle's many observations of marine biology was that the octopus can change colour when disturbed. Aristotle's biology 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 ...
Evolutionary biology. Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late ...
The basic idea of a ranking of the world's organisms goes back to Aristotle's biology. In his History of Animals , where he ranked animals over plants based on their ability to move and sense, and graded the animals by their reproductive mode, live birth being "higher" than laying cold eggs, and possession of blood, warm-blooded mammals and ...
The History of Animals contains a large number of eye-witness observations, in particular of marine biology, in sharp contrast to Plato's "symbolic zoology".Aristotle's style and precision can be seen in the passage where he discusses the behaviour and anatomy of the cephalopods, mentioning the use of ink against predators, camouflage, and signalling.
Four categories of questions and explanations. Evolutionary (ultimate) explanations. First question: Function (adaptation) Second question: Phylogeny (evolution) Proximate explanations. Third question: Mechanism (causation) Fourth question: Ontogeny (development) Causal relationships. Examples.
Spontaneous generation is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular. It was hypothesized that certain forms, such as fleas, could arise from inanimate matter such as dust, or that maggots could arise from dead flesh.
Aristotle 's Four Causes illustrated for a table: material (wood), formal (structure), efficient (carpentry), final (dining). The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, four fundamental types of answer to the question "why?" in analysis of change or movement in nature: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final.
Teleology, from Greek τέλος, telos "end, purpose" [3] and -λογία, logia, "a branch of learning", was coined by the philosopher Christian von Wolff in 1728. [4] The concept derives from the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle, where the final cause (the purpose) of a thing is its function. [5] However, Aristotle's biology does not ...