SQUONKSTAIL wrote:
"Also, it has been said that if the Nobel prize could be given posthumously, then Aristotle should get it for discovering DNA."
According to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genome/her_ari.html
"The Greek philosopher [Aristotle] correctly believed that both mother and father contribute biological material toward the creation of offspring, but he was mistakenly convinced that a child is the product of his or her parents' commingled blood. Semen, Aristotle held, was a man's purified blood, which could engender a child when coupled with menstrual blood inside a woman's body."
Aristotle said nothing about DNA or its structure, as far as I know, and
as you can see from the paragraph above, made a very good guess for his
time about how sex worked, but got it wrong. This is hardly the standard
by which we give out Nobel prizes today, but this is typical of the
quality of Aristotle's output for how the natural world worked.
Some have said that William Sidis proposed the existence of black holes
(on the basis of a startlingly liberal interpretation of a muddled
cosmological essay he wrote) decades before the physics community did.
Maybe we should also be giving him a posthumous Nobel, eh Squonkstail?
Glenn
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