as founding head of IMB's Genomics and Computational Biology division. He concurrently served as founding director of the Australian Research Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and later co-founded QFAB Informatics. Ragan is co-author of A Biochemical Phylogeny of the Protists (1978) and numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Cell, Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Microbiology, PNAS, and more. He is a former president and an honorary lifetime member of the International Seaweed Association and currently senior fellow of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society.
Ragan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains: The History of High-Level Biological Classification, and reported the following:
Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains explores how the living world has been conceptualized, from prehistoric times up to the present day. Broad groups of natural beings can be discerned in early figurative art, symbolic language, folk taxonomies, and creation myths. High-level concepts of plants and animals were afoot a couple of generations before Aristotle, and became embedded in all manner of esoteric, religious, philosophical and practical traditions. Many beings, however, fit uncomfortably, if at all, into these high-level groups. Different organisms were considered problematic at different times and for various reasons, and our narrative follows these changing currents.Learn more about Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 of the print edition discusses the Rasā’il (Epistles) of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā (Brethren of Purity), an “esoteric fraternity” of intellectuals active in Tenth-century Iraq. (The discussion starts at the bottom of page 98, and runs to mid-page 100). For the Brethren, man is a microcosmos, while conversely the world is “a macroanthropos endowed with a body, a soul, a life, and knowledge”. They recognize three (mineral, plant, animal) or four genera (these plus man) of sublunar beings, and arrange them in a hierarchy of “nobility” or “purity” of universal soul. Minerals arise by a coagulation of fundamental substances, while metals arise from mercury and sulphur in a second stage of mixing and natural refinement. Let us quote the paragraphs on plants and animals in full, omitting seven footnotes:Plants— ‘every body that comes out from earth, is nourished, and grows’ — are of three kinds: trees, crops, and herbs. Unlike minerals, plants cannot be transformed into one another. The vegetative soul brings about seven biological functions: attraction, retention, digestion, expulsion, nutrition, formation, and accretion. The Brethren’s description of the mineral-plant interface is difficult to understand, but involves ‘green manure’ (moss?) and truffles, one a ‘vegetal mineral’, the other a ‘mineral plant’. Other vegetal degrees rank above these, and share with animals the sense of touch. The plant adjacent to the animal degree is the date palm, an ‘animal plant, as some of its actions and states are distinct from the states of plants, even though its body is a plant’ and ‘a plant with regard to its body, but an animal with regard to its soul’. Parasitic plants, which draw nutrition not from the earth but (like a worm) from trees, likewise exhibit the actions of the animal soul. Coral is a plant.The text goes on to consider how the Brethren arrange the animals within each class, then returns to their terminology “vegetal animal” and “animal plant”; mentions their argument that the human embryo is successively under the influence of the vegetable (the first four months) and animal souls (months five until birth), with the human soul taking control only thereafter; and concludes with their message that animals have intrinsic worth beyond utility to man: “Animals were created by Allāh, and praise Him as they are able”.
The Brethren classify animals in several ways, employing diverse criteria. With regard to the faculties of soul they recognize five stages: worms that breed in clay (the lowest, ‘almost on a par with plants’, with only the sense of touch); worms that crawl on leaves, with taste and touch; animals which live in the deep sea and other dark places, which additionally have the sense of smell; insects, possessing these plus hearing; and perfect animals, which also have sight. Worms in general are ‘vegetal animals’ because their body ‘grows as some plants do, but it stands autonomously, and because of the fact that it moves its body with a voluntary movement, it is an animal.’ More specifically, the lowest animal is the ‘cane worm’, perhaps referring to the snail.
How does the Page 99 Test perform in this instance? Over 449 pages of text, 182 pages of endnotes, and 139 pages of references, Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains explores hundreds of high-level biological classifications, many fundamentally different from that of the Brethren. Their use of storytelling to make an argument is uncommon outside the Arabic tradition, while the availability of modern English translations sets their Rasā’il apart from most Arabic and Islamic works of this era. Like many other ancients, however, the Brethren draw on Pythagoras and Neoplatonism, and the main concepts they put in play – plants, animals, man, borderline beings, hierarchy, soul, form, function, movement – reappear throughout the book. On balance, the Page 99 Test works acceptably well for Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains.
--Marshal Zeringue
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