History of biology
From Freepedia
The history of biology dates as far back as the rise of various civilization as classic philosophers did their own ways of biology as a system of understanding life.
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The term
Formed by combining the Greek βίος (bios), meaning 'life', and λόγος (logos), meaning 'study of', the word "biology" in its modern sense seems to have been introduced independently by Karl Friedrich Burdach in 1800, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, 1802) and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Hydrogéologie, 1802). The word itself 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.
Biology in ancient time
From the very beginning people must have had knowledge about plants and animals that made them capable in hunting and agriculture. For example, they had to know how to avoid poisonous plants and how to treat animals. Biology hence predates the written history of humans.
Ancient Oriental people knew about the pollination of date palm from a very early point of time. In Mesopotamia they knew that pollen could be used in fertilizing plants. A business contract of the Hammurabi period (c. 1800 BC) mentions flowers of the date palm as an article of commerce.
In India texts described some aspects of bird life. In Egypt the mathamorphosis of insects and frogs was described. Egyptians and babylonians also knew of anatomy and physiology in various forms. In Mesopotamia, animals were sometimes kept in what can be described as the first zoological gardens.
However, superstitious thoughts often blended with real knowledge. In Babylon and Assyria organs of animals were used in prediction, and in Egypt medicine included a large amount of mysticism.
In the Graeco-Roman world scholars became more interested in rationalist methods. Aristotle is one of the most prolific natural philosophers of antiquity. He made countless observations of nature, especially the habits and attributes of plants and animals in the world around him, which he devoted considerable attention to categorizing.
In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder is known for his knowledge of plants and nature. Later, Claudius Galen became a pioneer in medicine and anatomy.
Medieval biology
This time is often called the dark age of biology. However, some people who dealt with medical issues, was showing their interest in plants and animals as well. In the Arab world, science about nature was kept. Many of the greek works was translated and the knowledge of Aristotle was used. Of the Arab biologists, al-Jahiz, who died about 868, is particularly noteworthy. He wrote Kitab al Hayawan (Book of animals). In the 1200's the german scholar named Albertus Magnus (He was by the way the teacher of Thomas Aquinas) wrote De vegetabilibus, seven books, and De animalibus, 26 books. He was particularly interested in plant propagation and reproduction and discussed in some detail the sexuality of plants and animals.
The Renaissance
Interestingly, as many virtual artists was interested in the bodies of animals and humans, they studied the physiology in detailes. Such comparisations as that between a horse leg and a human leg were made. Otto Brunfels, Hieronymus Bock and Leonhard Fuchs were three men who wrote books about wild plants; they have been referd to as the german fathers of botany. Books about animals were also made, such as those by Conrad Gesner, illustrated by among others Albrecht Dürer. Inaccurate knowledge, often a gross one, was still in effect, and in many cases old legends of the greeks was preserved.
Modern biology
As technology went forward, so did the science. The predecessors of the microscope were constructed in the following time. Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) investigated blood this way. On this point of time, people also learned to know sperm cells, although strange thoughts about their functions often was spread. Systematizing and classifying dominated biology throughout much of the 17th and 18th centuries, the most famous person here is Carl von Linné (1707-1778). He it was inventing the taxonomy system with scientific names in latin. The long-held idea that living organisms could originate from nonliving matter (spontaneous generation) began to crumble. It was finally disproved by Louis Pasteur.
In the 19th century the area of genetics developed, when the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel formulated his laws of inheritance published in 1866. However, his work was not recognized for a few decades afterward. The other important scientist that influenced this field was the British scientist Charles Darwin, who was encouraged to publish his thoughts in the field by the independent work of Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin's famous work On the Origin of Species (1859) describes natural selection, the primary mechanism for evolution. Implications of evolution on fields outside of pure science have led to both opposition and support from different parts of society.
By 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick clarified the basic structure of DNA, the genetic material for expressing life in all of its forms3.
After the success of the discovery of the structure of DNA, Crick turned to the problem of consciousness; in the meantime, the studies of developmental biology came to the fore as unsolved problems. Clones of both plants and animals were attempted, with some success, but with attendant ethical questions. In particular, totipotent stem cells have come to be recognized as a fundamental object of study for the understanding of developmental biology, and for medical therapies.
See also
Notes
Note 3: James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick. "Letters to Nature: Molecular structure of Nucleic Acid." Nature 171, 737–738 (1953).. Additional information about this famous journal article is at this Wikipedia page: Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids.
