The Case of Aristotle's Curdling Foetus

by Asa Boxer

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When I learned that Aristotle had described biological conception as resembling the curdling action of rennet on milk, I was pretty amused. What a poetic flourish! The reasoning process is both analogical and analytical, with deductive logic that follows from his metaphysics. The language is a mix of figurative and scientific, using curdling imagery and the terminologies of biology, physics, and metaphysics:

When the material secreted by the female in the uterus has been fixed by the semen of the male (this acts in the same way as rennet acts upon milk, for rennet is a kind of milk containing vital heat, which brings into one mass and fixes the similar material, and the relation of the semen to the catamenia is the same, milk and the catamenia being of the same nature)—when, I say, the more solid part comes together, the liquid is separated off from it, and as the earthly parts solidify membranes form all round it; this is both a necessary result and a final cause, the former because the surface of a mass must solidify on heating as well as on cooling, the latter because the foetus must not be in a liquid but be separated from it. (De generatione animalium, Bk. II, 739b, 22-31)

Aristotle’s method of consideration is both convincing and thorough in a way that reaches well beyond our present scientific way of observing and considering the world. In a short paragraph, he takes us through various levels of speculation, from mundane cheese making to the metaphysical notions of “necessary result” and “final cause.”

Owing to the completeness of the text in this regard, his entire paradigm is on display. These days, science takes the metaphysics as implicit, essentially, because such matters are deemed philosophical and unnecessary to the practice of science. Consequently, the premises of reasoning are lost from the logical structures, and the most fundamental errors are, therefore, obscured.

Since the lockdowns, many began to consider the problem of correlation and causation, which is, at heart, a metaphysical problem. Was it covid that killed people, or the poor treatment and lack of treatment that killed people? Was it the unmasked and unvaxed who killed people? Or was it the lockdowns, the fear mongering, the isolation, and poor medical protocols? Among other shenanigans, hospitals were incentivised through payouts to conflate death with covid and death from covid—upsetting this fundamental relationship between correlation and causation.

Despite the present-day hype that science is omniscient and the bastion of the one true Truth, there are many things that we glaringly don’t know. The idea of curdling milk as a model for foetus formation seems quaint to us today. But what will our own ideas look like in the future? The present model is immensely analogical: the ovum, or egg, is the necessary kernel for most biological life, and the fertilising of this egg is the work of some form of biological material that activates a process of cellular division and differentiation. What we don’t know is how this differentiation takes place. That’s a pretty massive gap in our understanding, wouldn’t you say? Without that knowledge, what does fertilisation mean?

Aristotle was actually trying to explain the phenomenon. We, on the other hand, stop at a surface description and pump our long guns in triumph like the primitive sand people from Star Wars. Our conception of conception in the ever-so-advanced twenty-first century is that babies are made with magic dust and magic mucus when they come in contact with an egg. We have some microscopy videos to give it that sciency flavour: you can observe the sperm race for yourself, see? And we have some great sciency (descriptive) words like mitosis and meiosis at the ready to make it sound like we’ve solved one of the great mysteries of creation. See the cells divide under the microscope? But fundamentally, it’s smoke and mirrors, obscuring what we don’t know. Distracted by the instrumentation (microscopy in this case), we forget the question we were asking in the first place: to explain the phenomenon. That’s the state of enlightenment we’re at. Some may be surprised to learn that DNA research has brought us no closer to the answer. Since identical DNA is in the nucleus of every cell in one’s body, DNA research brings us no closer to understanding how a cell knows it’s a muscle, neuron, heart, or bone cell.

Of course, biology, medicine, epidemiology, and virology aren’t the only areas where this sort of trouble arises in the sciences. I’ve previously written about our casino model of the universe, and how we perceive too many phenomena in terms of probabilities. I’ve pointed out that these probability models pertaining to phenomena as varied as evolution and quantum physics are logically broken, since they must assume a game with possible and meaningful outcomes. No such models could exist without design, the very thing these naturalist disciplines reject. Since the metaphysics remains implicit, scientists in these fields (and the credulous public) can go about their business unaware of how deeply flawed, inconsistent, incoherent, and incomplete their notions about the world truly are. Given the branding of science today, the authority, money, and socio-cultural capital afforded its lab-approved representatives, we find ourselves in a world where it is widely believed that only stupid people ask questions.

At the heart of this matter is our cultural blindness to the metaphors that form the substrate of our perceptions. If we hope to evolve and advance scientifically, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually, we’re going to have to acknowledge the role played by analogy in all forms of reasoning, not to disparage and dispense with it, but to leverage it, and, thereby reach that understanding toward which science has been pointing, which is true uncertainty, humility, and the partial nature of knowledge. We can laugh at Aristotle’s milk-and-rennet analogy, but we haven’t even replaced his explanation with a better one. All we’ve provided are scientiphysized descriptions, sciency jargon, and sciency imagery. And we too will be ridiculed.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.