In the nineteenth century the science of biology, including botany and zoology, was just beginning to mature while astronomy, physics, and math were already established sciences. Victorian members of the middle class were affluent and interested in...

study of living things and their vital processes. The field deals with all the physicochemical aspects of life. As a result of the modern tendency to unify scientific knowledge and investigation, however, there has been an overlapping of the field of...

The field of biology is currently delivering a broad repertoire of explanatory tools for identity, behaviour and social configurations. After the Second World War, while physicists were celebrated as hero scientists, biology was condemned for its...

Three giants of nineteenth-century life sciences set the stage for many of the biological investigations undertaken in the first half of the twentieth century. Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) On the Origin of Species (1859) established the theory...

The achievements of ancient peoples are difficult to document because few written records have survived from the period before 2000 B.C. Most of the available evidence comes from archaeological investigations of the physical remains of various...

There was relatively little interest expressed in the life sciences during the Middle Ages. However, several factors developed in the later medieval period that led to a renewed interest in the careful observation of nature on the part of Europeans....

The Greeks had made important contributions to the life sciences, including writings on medicine by Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 B.C.), work on plant and animal classification by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and books on anatomy by Galen (c.130-c.200). In...

Early in the twentieth century the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's (1822-1884) work on heredity in pea plants led to the development of the field of genetics. In the 1940s Oswald Avery (1877- 1947) and his research associates at the Rockefeller...

Though his research did not directly involve the life sciences, the seventeenth-century physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727) greatly influenced how living things were studied in the eighteenth century because of his emphasis on finding simple laws...

What role do computers play in the study of biology? Most people understand that computers produce spreadsheets, help analyze data, graph results of experiments, and prepare final reports for presentations. Although computers are workhorses in these...

Natural history, the description and classification of natural forms, had been the main occupation of life scientists in the eighteenth century, and it expanded dramatically in the nineteenth. Voyages of exploration brought thousands of new plants and...

Study of living things and their vital processes. An extremely broad subject, biology is divided into branches. The current approach is based on the levels of biological organization involved (e.g., molecules, cells, individuals, populations) and on...

Biological and related...

Biology (from Greek: βίος, bio, "life"; and λÏγος, logos, "speech" lit. "to talk about life"), also referred to as the biological sciences, is the scientific study of life. Biology examines the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution,...