A cladistic analysis of Aristotle's animal groups in the Historia animalium

Abstract

The Historia animalium (HA) of Aristotle contains an extraordinarily rich compilation of descriptions of animal anatomy, development, and behaviour. It is believed that Aristotle's aim in HA was to describe the correlations of characters rather than to classify or define animal groups. In order to assess if Aristotle, while organising his character correlations, referred to a pre-existing classification that underlies the descriptions in HA, we carried out a cladistic analysis according to the following procedure: by disentangeling 147 species and 40 higher taxa-designations from 157 predicates in the texts, we transcribed Aristotle's descriptions on anatomy and development of animals in books I-V of HA into a character matrix for a cladistic analysis. By analysing the distribution of characters as described in his books, we obtained a non-phylogenetic dendrogram displaying 58 monophyletic groups, 29 of which have equivalents among Aristotle's group designations. Eleven Aristotelian groupings turned out to be non-monophyletic, and six of them are inconsistent with the monophyletic groups. Twelve of 29 taxa without equivalents in Aristotle's works have equivalents in modern classifications. With this analysis we demonstate there exists a fairly consistent underlying classification in the zoological works of Aristotle. The peculiarities of Aristotle's character basis are discussed and the dendrogram is compared with a current phylogenetic tree.