Susan H. Gordon’s review of Armand Marie Leroi’s The Lagoon: “And so, in 2014, Aristotle joins the ranks of his fellow biologists. ‘Intimacy with the natural world shines from his works,’ writes Leroi, a communion that allowed Aristotle to ‘sieve the ocean of natural history folklore and travelogue for grains of truth from which to build a new science.’ Following his new scientific inquiry, Aristotle arrived at a final why: Why does any of this happen at all? It would take centuries before Darwin could find a scientifically plausible answer, and in ancient Greece Aristotle looked again to the practical for his own: Biological systems are true so that we might exist. And to exist is simply better than to not exist.”