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A quote often gets spread around to mock Aristotle, for his supposed unscientific reasoning, by Bertrand Russell on how Aristotle said that women have less teeth than men, and didn't bother to look. The quote is used by all manner of people to show how foolish Aristotle was, and even philosophers or ancients in general. All sorts of explanations are offered online, I even heard it said that he deduced it from his prior belief that women are inferior to men. I guess the hidden assumption behind that one is "the more teeth you have, the more superior you must be". Which, to be fair, if a dude had like 600 teeth, that would be pretty cool I guess.

Carl Sagan also repeated this quote rather thoughtlessly in Cosmos, seeming to imply that Aristotle logically deduced the fact from it being true in other animals, rather than relying on scientific observation. The Aristotle quote is sometimes included :

Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine

However, the full Aristotle quote is actually this, which isn't shown:

Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made.

A strange thing to say for someone who doesn't believe in empirical observation. Sagan doesn't actually mention Russell, but it's pretty obvious he is repeating Russell's quote, almost certainly without reading the original Aristotle. Ironic, of course, because that's just the sort of thing Russell was complaining about:

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.

Russell is specifically complaining about people positioning themselves as an authority on a subject without researching it personally. Aristotle is probably just passing along information he's heard (although some have pointed out it is even possible he did check, wisdom teeth in women often come in later or are less visible), in the exact same way Sagan is. Of course, the irony of Russell's quote can't be ignored either, since he claims not a single ancient or medieval author refused to dogmatically talk about unicorns, even though he is currently talking about Aristotle, who compiled the largest book on animal biology in the ancient world, and not once does he mention unicorns (he does briefly mention that Salamanders are an example of animals that can't be destroyed by fire, but he actually makes it quite clear that this is hearsay "so the story goes, not only walks through the fire but puts it out in doing so", a caveat he doesn't use for, say, camels). Come on Russell, there is at least one.

It should also be pointed out that it is beyond absurd to expect Aristotle to have personally verified every observation he is recounting in what is more or less the largest compilation of natural knowledge in the ancient world, or indeed for a 2,000 biology textbook to have no mistakes. Russell is living in a time when specialists wrote on one subject, in which case yes, you had better not be wrong, but Aristotle is obviously forced to rely on accounts from others, as everyone must.

All that aside though, one real question looms in everyone's mind: did Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and everyone else who repeats this quote count their wives' teeth? The author of this critique has in fact not, for the record.

Philosophers in this comic: Aristotle, Bertrand Russell