Abstract

Aristotle thought that the albumen of bird’s eggs was hotter than the yolk. As he was convinced that the principle of life is located in the hotter substance, he located the proto-heart, not in the germinal disc near the surface of the yolk, but in the albumen. The early modern biologists Aldrovandi, Coiter, and Harvey, blinded the albumen. The early modern biologists Aldrovandi, Coiter, and Harvey, blinded by the halo effect, tried to explain away this mistake by overinterpretation, thus creating or contributing to the creation of an availability cascade which has rendered Aristotle’s mistake invisible to most Aristotelian scholars.