Aristotle on Safari
“Has the semen soul or not?” I underline the sentence in pencil and close the book with a wry smile. Aristotle is not the only one who has been wondering that over the last 25 centuries. I am about to board the “Africa tram” at the Safari Park in San Diego where my husband is giving yet another keynote talk this evening. With a couple of lazy hours in the sun ahead of me, I settle in and let Ebony narrate our way through this Africa-in-miniature, my mind slowly rolling over the passages of my favorite Greek philosopher. His writing is a masterclass in thinking — the simplicity of his arguments, his deductive reasoning, and his acuity are remarkable. Today I am nose-deep in The Generation of Animals, Περί Ζώων Γενέσεως, which he wrote in the 350s B.C.E, a fitting companion at a zoo.
Our first stop on the tram is by the rhinos. I have never seen rhinos thumping down a grassy hill in pairs and I am taken by their comical girth and clumsiness. Ebony’s voice rises in pride and excitement, San Diego Zoo has 40 success stories fighting extinction, and here we are about to witness one of the greatest in the making. The lady next to me slurps her diet coke in anticipation. “The northern white rhino is biologically extinct, which means that there is no way for the natural population to recover without human intervention”, Ebony explains. “There are only two animals left in the wild, and both are female”. The diet cola lady chuckles. “But here, at THE ZOO, the southern white rhino ladies, close relatives of the biologically extinct species, will give birth to a northern white rhino. They will be artificially inseminated with an embryo, assembled from the cryopreserved genetic material of 12 individuals. In 15 years the northern white rhino WILL BE BACK”. She sounds like Schwarzenegger’s character at the end of Terminator. The rhinos continue to quietly munch on the grass and I am not sure what to make of these resurrection incubators.
Aristotle would be stupefied. He was absolutely enthralled by “generation”, which he saw as the unifying characteristic of all living things. Stones are not alive because they cannot generate more of themselves. But we can and so can plants. For Aristotle, generation defines life. How organisms achieve generation, is the subject of the book I am reading. Aristotle argues that for animals at the very least, it is clear that two sexes are required. The male provides sperm, and the female, quite literally is moved into action during sexual intercourse, to concoct a new organism. (N.B. Aristotle has quite a lot to say about movement during sex, somewhere around Book II, for the interested). Critically, all constituent parts of the organism are present at birth — we are born whole. None of this is obvious. It could have been the case that we are born a rib, which grows into a heart, that produces a liver and so on, until we become a human whole. Aristotle identifies the traits that all living things share, and subsequently uses these observations as pillars for deductive reasoning. Selectively, he looks for things that are common to plants and animals, to reject theories that may explain life in only one of its corners.
Meanwhile, Ebony is having a hard time with all the species antelope at this zoo: in some cases the males are horned, in others it is the females, and occasionally both sexes are adorned with weaponry. The reasons proposed for one are contradicted by another species of hooved beauty just around the corner. “Nature is complicated, like Tinder” she offers. “There is a lot of pretending and camouflage”. This is the antithesis of Aristotelian thinking. Nothing in nature is complicated, provided you identify the connections that are universal. Such Aristotelian reverence for the order observed in Nature is shared by evolutionary biologists, and has been at least partially mechanistically revealed to us by geneticists. For more than two thousand years we have suspected there is a code of conduct to life. Now we know this code is written in nucleic acid. Darwin wrote “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle”.
I look over the long passages that Aristotle dedicates to sperm. His reasoning is lucid: if so little of this substance has the generative capacity to turn a female pregnant, it must be special. Since the man doesn’t need to produce the organism, his role must be equivalent to that of an artist, the generator of motion that stirs the material, the woman, into molding a living being. “It is plain therefore that semen both has soul, and is soul, potentially”, he concludes sharply, a few sentences after posing the question of whether sperm has soul.
We take another little break, this time by the flamingo. They are the Great flamingo, white in colour, native to Africa. The males are cocking their heads vigorously, trying to vie for the attention of the females, but the whole “flamboyance” (Ebony teaches us the collective nouns for all the animals) moves as one organism when we come a little closer. This reminds me that the entire world comes together or crumbles under the weight of our assumptions. Aristotle was wrong when he ascribed a higher power to sperm, placing man hierarchically above woman in the Natural order. A simple error based on insufficient observation. The collective knowledge of the biological equality of sperm and egg came much later, but the legacy of misogyny remains.
I try not to resent Aristotle, although occasionally I wonder if he had ever truly been in love with a woman. Invariably we look for confirmation for our assumptions from experience, which includes our feelings. The tram pulls back to home base to a couple of lazy lions, basking in the afternoon rays together. To me they look in balanced union. Surely perfection is in the eye of the beholder?
