Complex sentence: Much of knowledge of insects in the 17th century was inherited from Aristotle, and according to this Classical paradigm the gulf between insects and other animals was so significant as to disqualify them from the types of investigations done on fish, reptiles, and mammals.
Split into simpler sentences: Much of knowledge of insects in the 17th century was inherited from Aristotle. According to this Classical paradigm, the gulf between insects and other animals was so significant as to disqualify them from the types of investigations done on fish, reptiles, and mammals.