Biology/Citable Version

The word "Biology" is formed by combining the Greek βίος (bios), meaning 'life', and λόγος (logos), meaning 'study of'. "Biology" in its modern use was probably introduced independently by both Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, 1802) and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Hydrogéologie, 1802). Although the word "biology" is sometimes said to have been coined in 1800 by Karl Friedrich Burdach, it appears in the title of Volume 3 of Michael Christoph Hanov's Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae dogmaticae: Geologia, biologia, phytologia generalis et dendrologia, published in 1766.

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collage image needed: fabulous shot of earth from space, juxtaposed to images of plants, animals, and people

Biology is the science of life. Biologists study all aspects of living things, including each of the many life forms on earth. Currently, the world's research in biology centers on the dynamic processes that enable life, rather than individual types of plants, animals or micro-organisms. Those vital processes include the harnessing of energy, the synthesis of the materials that make up the body, the healing of injuries, and the reproduction of the entire organism, among many other activities.

Living organisms have been of interest to all peoples throughout history, and, accordingly, the roots of biology go back to earliest mankind. Curiosity about the physical beings of people, plants, and animals runs deep in every human society. How is it that these bodies change; develop, grow, and age? What is it that underlies the divide between inanimate objects and the living entities in the world? Some of those questions stem from our desire to control life processes, and to exploit natural resources. Pursuit of the answers has led to an understanding of organisms that has steadily improved our standard of living through the ages. But questions also come from a desire to understand nature rather than to control it, and the very core of that desire is sparked by a commonly felt need to understand the human condition and the nature of the world.

Not all natural lore is biology, no matter how accurate or useful, and no matter that the subject is a plant or animal. Biologists incorporate an understanding of mathematics, physics, chemistry and other sciences, along with adherence to the scientific method, to their study of living things. Still, all human interaction with nature eventually adds to the biologists' understanding, whether the original ideas came from evidence in the laboratory or the studbook of the horseman, from the notebook of the ecologist or the field notes of the hunter.

The Scope of Biology

How did life begin? What features separate something that is alive from something that is not alive?. The biologist uses science to try to answer these fundamental questions, questions that also concern the philosopher, the rabbi, the iman, and the priest - as well as every person who retains a sense of wonder. Whether scientific thinking about these issues is compatable with religious beliefs is itself contentious. Some great thinkers, such as the physicist Albert Einstein, have found no real conflict between the varying teachings of science and religion, but consider Divinity and the Natural Universe to be one and the same (see Albert Einstein for detailed discussion with references). In this view, the differences between mathematical equations and the language of prophets are simply two different forms of human expression, each attempting to describe a higher dimension than ordinary human experience.

Many independent scientific fields make up Biology, but all are related. Natural History (the study of individual species like white-tailed deer, sugar maple trees, box jellyfish and timber wolves) was one of the first areas of biology to develop. In natural history, whole organisms are studied in an attempt to make sense of the order of Nature. When the natural histories of plants and animals are considered in a context of how each affects the other and their environment, then the biologist's focus is on ecology. Some fields of biology focus on the natural history of living organisms and their interactions within a certain realm of the earth, as in marine biology; others focus on particular aspects of the bodies of living organisms, like their structure (Anatomy) or function (Physiology). Studies of animals form the field of Zoology, whereas the study of plants is called Botany. Medicine and the Health Sciences apply biology to understanding disease and to improving health. Many of the academic disciplines that make up biology are listed at the bottom of this article along with a brief description. Further information about each is provided through links to other articles within Citizendium that can be accessed by clicking each discipline's name.

The development of biology

Roots of Biology in the Ancient World

Whether foragers or farmers, hunters or herders, people have always depended on plants and animals for sustenance. Rather than take this sustenance simply as found, humans generally change their immediate environment by carrying food items from place to place, and processing them in various fashions. Because of human intelligence, xxxxx this section needs development - explain about start with sugary cob, end up planting seeds. ( Ref -Sweet Beginnings: Stalk Sugar and the Domestication of Maize1/Comments/ReplyJohn Smalley, Michael Blake, Sergio J Chavez, Warren R Deboer, et al. Current Anthropology. Chicago: Dec 2003. Vol. 44, Iss. 5; p. 675). When there is intellectual consideration of what plants are; and evidence-based experiments are used to understand their growth, then botany, the science of plants, joins agriculture as a human endeavor.

The foundation of Anatomy and Zoology both date back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, to the Fourth Century BC. In the first known book on how life in the womb begins, Aristotle suggested that the woman provides the substance needed to build the new baby while the man provides the "soul" that gives the substance life. Aristotle used logic and observation to arrive at his theory, which, in some points, was still accepted 2000 years later. Aristotle believed in a philosophic principle called epigenesis, the emergence of order from disorder, and current biology holds that life processes xxxstatement about using energy to combat entropy. His conclusion that the woman's contribution was the mere soil for the man's seed, the male contribution to a new human containing the nascent child that simply required a nurturing womb, was likely influenced by the general agreement, in his society, that women were not as highly developed as men. It may also have come from the examination of the seeds of some trees, in which the entire immature plant is contained within the husk, and springs into independant life as a young tree once planted. A popular idea that grew out of Aristotle's musings was that sperm contained a perfect miniature version of the new baby - a homunculus.

Early Biology : The Establishment of the Scientific Method

A workable classification of living things was made practical by Linneas using a form of systematic nomenclature he invented. This gives a unique name to each kind of plant and animal, and organizes all of them into a classification scheme that stresses similarities of physical features. This naming system is still used today, and each known species has one unique scientific name that biologists all over the world recognize.

Technology advances Biology

• • • First Glimpses of the Microscopic World

The features of plants and animals have often been understood on an entirely different levels with technological advances that provided new means for examining them. For example, the microscope, modified by the hands of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in the Seventeenth Century, revealed details of structure in the bodies of organisms that had never before been even suspected. Individual eggs and spermatozoa were seen first by him, and being quite familiar with the theories of Aristotle, he reported that he could actually see homunculi in the heads of living spermatozoa - an example of even a great scientist sometimes seeing what he expected to see, not what was really there. Science is always influenced by past ideas. No scientist can consider any idea, or analyze experiemental results without using his or her mind. That mind is both consciously and unconsciously stamped with the culture that produced it.

Not only was the structure of flesh and plants seen at a new level of detail, but completely new types of organisms were also revealed: micro-organisms that could not be detected with the naked eye. Like all important technological advances in biology, the microsocope led to new ideas about living things. The concept that tissues were composed of cells was clarified, the field of microbiology was born, and the ground was prepared for the germ theory of disease, an idea that helped bring the traditional practice of western medicine (sometimes called allopathy) into the field of health science and modern medicine.

Further developments led to the modern compound microscope by the end of the 19th century, with much higher resolution, and eventually the late 20th century electron microscopes (Image needed?). Science differs from religious and political doctrine in at least one major manner – tenants are not to be held sacred but questioned and tested. This has proved damaging for many of them, including the homunculus theory of fetal development. With improved optics and such new imaging techniques as scanning and transmission electron microscopes, that "little man" inside the sperm cell vanished forever.

Main topics and discoveries

• Evolution
• Common descent
• Homeostasis

Major discoveries in biology include:

• Cell theory
• Germ theory of disease
• Genetics
• Evolution
• DNA

Disciplines within biology

• Anatomy: The study of structure
• Biochemistry: The chemistry of living things is a field of both biology and chemistry
• Cell Biology: The study of the components of cells
• Genetics: The study of the inheritance of characteristics, genes and DNA
• Marine Biology: The study of life in the seas and oceans
• Behavior:
• Biodiversity:
• Biogeography:
• Botany:
• Developmental biology:
• Ecology:
• Ethology:
• Evolutionary biology:
• Molecular biology:
• Physiology:
• systematics:
• Taxonomy:
• Zoology:

References

Citations

Further reading

Selected external links

The following links have been reviewed and are recommended because, at the time of their inclusion, they provided accurate information and portals to additional excellent web resources. Many other excellent links have been omitted through no fault of their own.

Plain and technical language

• The American Institute of Biological Sciences (ABIBS) Virtual Library is free to all visitors
• The Bio-Web reviews and gives access to information in Cell and Molecular Biology, includes "news" in plain language
• Cell and Molecular Biology Online is a resource for professionals that includes links and some information for all
• Kimball's Biology Pages represent an online biology textbook