Ask Lemmy

The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.

For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a "doubled seed" which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.

And because Aristotle's stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.

But he just assumed the Queen was a King

Actually, he acknowledged "some say" the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn't be because the gods don't give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being "by God's design" because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).

So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.

Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.