Armand Marie Leroi – författare

In the Eastern Aegean lies an island of forested hills and olive groves, with streams, marshes and a lagoon that nearly cuts the land in two. It was here, over two thousand years ago, that Aristotle came to work.Aristotle was the greatest philosopher of all time. Author of the Poetics, Politics and Metaphysics, his work looms over the history of Western thought. But he was also a biologist – the first. Aristotle explored the mysteries of the natural world. With the help of fishermen, hunters and farmers, he catalogued the animals in his world, dissected them, observed their behaviours and recorded how they lived, fed, and bred. In his great zoological treatise, Historia animalium, he described the mating habits of herons, the sexual incontinence of girls, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of sponges, the flippers of seals, the sounds of cicadas, the destructiveness of starfish, the dumbness of the deaf, the flatulence of elephants and the structure of the human heart. And then, in another dozen books, he explained it all. In The Lagoon, acclaimed biologist Armand Marie Leroi recovers Aristotle’s science. He goes to Lesbos to see the creatures that Aristotle saw, where he saw them, and explores the Philosopher’s deep ideas and inspired guesses – as well as the things that he got wildly wrong. Leroi shows how Aristotle’s science is deeply intertwined with his philosophical system and how modern science even now bears the imprint of its inventor.

Full of fascinating and bizarre cases of genetic mutation and irregularity, ‘Mutants’ is an amazing exploration of the human form in all its beautiful and unique guises.Why are most of us born with one nose, two legs, ten fingers and twenty-four ribs – and some of us not? Why do most of us stop growing in our teens – while others just keep going? Why do some us have heads of red hair – and others no hair at all? The human genome, we are told, makes us what we are. But how?Armand Marie Leroi takes us to the extremes of human mutation – from the grotesque to the beautiful, and often both at the same time – to explain how we become what we are. Through the tales of long-lived Croatian dwarves, ostrich-footed Wadoma tribesmen, sex-changing French convent girls, and many more wonders of human development, Leroi has written a brilliant narrative account of our genetic grammar and people whose bodies have revealed it.