Biology: Understanding Biology, the Philosophers and Biologist

Biology comes from the Greek words “bios” means life, and “logos” means study.

Literally, biology is the study of life. Since the word “life” is so abstract, we can define biology more appropriately as the study of living things.

Biology – learn about the many different forms of living things, their structures and functions, origin, relationship with one another, and differences from nonliving things.

The study of biology teaches us to ask questions, to examine evidences, and to solve problems in scientific way.

Natural Philosophers

The Natural Philosophers were people who desired to understand nature.

They were the first to think critically and seek logical explanations about natural phenomena.

They did not test what they said or observed, but wrote what seemed logical about them.

Anaximander – A Greek philosopher, who lived from 610 to 546 B.C., wrote what may be the first theory of evolution. In his classical poem entitled “On Nature”, he said, “In the beginning, there was a fishlike creature with scales etc., that arose and lived in the World Ocean. As some of these organisms advanced, they moved onto land, shed their scaly coverings, and became humans.”

Xenophanes – was born in 570 B.C. He was one of the first people to write about his observations of fossils. He thought that fossils were an indication  that there was water or mud in an area.

Hippocrates – was thought to have lived and practiced medicine from about 460 to 300 B.C. His writings have had a profound influence on the practice of medicine. One of the things for which he is remembered is his theory that the human body was composed of the four elements (earth, air,  fire, water) pus four fluids or humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

Aristotle – lived from 384 to 322 B.C. and contributed much to what we now consider to be the realm of biology. One of his contributions was in taxonomy. He was the first to classify living things. Our current technical terms genus and sapiens are Latin translation of Greek words first used by  Aristotle. During his time, Aristotle was called the Ille Philosophus (the Philosopher) or “the master of them that knows”.

Galen – lived from 131 to 210 A.D. He was a philosopher, physician and an anatomist. He was also famous for his descriptions of human anatomy  that eventually laid the foundation of medicine.

Birth of Modern Biology

The natural philosophers provided logical explanations to questions about life, their explanations were based merely on observations.

Biologist – differ in approach from that of the natural philosophers.

Biologist, like other scientists, based their explanations on careful observations and hypothesis testing. This approach for gathering information is called the scientific method.

The invention of the microscope in the mid-seventeenth century paved the way to an advancement of biological knowledge.

Robert Hooke – an English scientist, was the first person to see and name the basic structural and functional unit of life – the cell. With his crude microscope,  he observed this slices of cork and saw cube like structures, which he called cells.

Antoine Van Leeuwenhoek – a Dutch scientist was the first person to observed sperm cells and said that he saw tiny body parts in the sperm. In addition, Leeuwenhoek proposed that fertilization occurs when the sperm enters the egg, but this could not actually observe for another 100 years because of the quality of microscopes that was available during his time.

Carolus Linnaeus – proposed a more systematic way of grouping and naming organisms. He gave two part Latin names to each organisms he knew. Homo sapiens - the scientific name for human. He gets credit for our present day classification scheme, he has been called The Father of Taxonomy.

Charles Darwin – in 1859, he published his book On the Origin of Species, describing his theory of evolution based on data gathered during his voyages on the H. M. S. Beagle.

Gregor Mendel – (1865) an Augustinian monk, published a paper on genetics, explaining the principles that govern the inheritance of traits. He called the Father of Modern Genetics.

Johann Friedrich Miescher – (1869) a chemist, working with used bandages obtained from a hospital, had isolated from human pus substance he called nuclein, and soon began to called nucleic acid. The journey to the future of biology had begun.

In 1870, the process of cell division called mitosis, and the behavior of chromosomes were observed. Twenty-years later, the process of meiosis, a special cell division involved in producing eggs or sperm, was observed.

After Mendel’s work was rediscovered in 1900, researchers started seeing parallels between his theory of genetics and what the chromosomes were doing in mitosis and meiosis. From this, people figured out that Mendel’s genes were on the chromosomes.

James Watson and

Francis Crick – In 1953, they published a paper in which they proposed a hypothetical structure of DNA, which also showed that DNA could be the genetic code material and that it could replicate itself. Subsequent chemical analyses of DNA have upheld the prediction. Since the publication of their paper on DNA, our biological knowledge has increased tremendously, especially in the field of genetics.

Biology is the most diverse and dynamic field of science. Like a growing tree, biology forms new branches as more and mare discoveries about living and nonliving things come up.

The two major branches of biology are botany and zoology. Botany deals with the study of plants and zoology, the study of animals. Some of the important branches of biology are common to both botany and zoology. They are the following:

1. Anatomy - the study of the specific parts of an organism.
2. Physiology - the study of the functions of the parts of an organism.
3. Morphology – the study of the external structure and form of an organism.
4. Histology – the microscopic study of tissues of plants and animals.
5. Cytology – the study of the cell and its organelles.
6. Ecology - the study of relationship of organisms with their environment.
7. Taxonomy – the study of the identification, naming, and classification of organism.
8. Genetics – the study of inheritance and transfer of traits from generation to generation.
9. Evolution – the study of origin and differentiation of organism.
10. Embryology – the study of the growth and development of organism.
11. Paleontology – the study of fossils or preserved remains of living things.
12. Microbiology – the study of micro-organisms such as bacteria, viruses, and protozoans.
13. Biotechnology – deals with the applications of biological processes for the benefit of humans.

Two kinds of research

• Basic research – is simply seeking knowledge’s sake.
• Applied research – is the use of knowledge to solve specific problems.

Tags: biologist, botany study of plants, inheretance of traits, modern genetics, origin of species, philosophers, scientist, study of biology, study of life, taxonomy, zoology study of animals

Category: Biology