Biology is the scientific study of living things and their environment.
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines among the most important topics are five unifying principles that can be said to be the fundamental axioms of modern biology:
1.
Cells are the basic unit of life
2.
New species and inherited traits are the product
of evolution
3.
Genes are the basic unit of heredity
4.
An organism will regulate its internal
environment to maintain a stable and constant condition
5. Living organisms consume and transform energy.
Sub disciplines of biology are recognized on the basis of the scale at which organisms are studied and the methods used to study them:
1.
Biochemistry examines the rudimentary chemistry
of life:
2.
Molecular biology studies the complex
interactions of systems of biological molecules;
3.
Cellular biology examines the basic building
block of all life, the cell;
4.
Physiology examines the physical and chemical
fundtions of the tissues, organs and organ systems of an organism; and
5. Ecology examines how various organisms interrelate with their environment.
Historical Development
Modern Biology appears to have been introduced independently
by Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800), Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologic order
Philosophie der lebeden Natur, 1802), and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Hydrigeologie,
1802). It was inspired by the Greek word Bioc, bios, “life” and the
suffix-Aoyia, - logia, “study of”
Although biology is a relatively recent development, sciences related to and included within it have been studied since ancient times. Natural philosophy was studied as early as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egyt, the Indian subcontinent, and China However, the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature are most often traced back to ancient Greece.
The formal study of medicine dates back to Hippocrates (ca, 460 BC-ca, 370 BC) it was Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) who contributed most extensively to the development of biology. Worth mentioning is Aristotle’s History of Animals and other works where he showed naturalist leaning, and later more empirical works that focused on biological causation and diversity of life.
Aristotle successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to botany, even into the middle Ages. Significant advances in the study and development of biology were promoted through the efforts of such Muslim physicians as the Afro-Arab scholar al- Jahiz (781-869) in zoology, Kurdish biologist Al-Dinawari (829-896) in botany, and the Persian physician Rhazes (865-925) in anatomy and physiology.
These philosophers elaborated on, especially well studied by Islamic scholars working in Greek philosopher traditions, while natural history drew heavily on Aristotelian thought, especially in upholding a iced hierarchy of life.
Biology began to quickly develop and grow with Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s dramatic improvement of the microscope. It was then that scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria and the sheer strangeness’s and diversity of microscopic life. Investigations by Jan Swammerdam led to new interest in entomology and built the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining. Advances in microscopy also had a profound impact on biological thinking itself. In the early 19th century, a number of biologist pointed to the central importance of the cell.
In 1838 and 1839, Scheilden and Schwann began promoting the ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells have all the characteristic’s of life, although they opposed the idea that (3) all cells come from the division of other cells.
Through the efforts of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, by the 1860’s most biologists accepted all three tenets of what came to be known as cell theory.
On the other hand, taxonomy and classification became a focus in the study of natural history. Carolus Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in 1735, and in the 1750’s introduced scientific names for all his species.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Bufofon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable-even suggesting the possibility of common descent. Though he was opposed to evolution, Buffin suggesting the possibility of common descent.
Though he was opposed to evolution, Buffon is a key figure in the history of evolutionary theories of both Jean-Baptise Lamarck and Charles Darwin.
Serious evolutionary thinking originated with the works of Jean-Baptise lamarch, However, it was the british naturalist Charles Darwin, combining the biogeographical approach of Humboldt, the uniformitarian geology of Lyell, Thomas Malthus’s writings in evolutionary theory based on natural selection ; similar evidence led Alfred Russel Wallace to independently reach the same conclusions.
The discovery of the physical representation of heredity came along with evolutionary principles and population genetics. In the 1940’s and early 1950’s, experiments pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held genes. A focus on new model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics.
From the 1950’s to present times, biology has been vastly extended in the molecular domain. The DNA code was cracked by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after DNA Was proven to contain codons.
Finally, the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with
the goal of mapping the general human genome. This project was essentially
completed in 2003, with further analysis still being published. The Human
Genome Project was the first step in a globalized effort to incorporate
accumulated knowledge of biology into a functional, molecular definition of the
human body and the bodies of other organisms.