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Branches Of Biology
Biology – The natural science that studies life. Areas of focus include structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. History of biology *History of anatomy *History of biochemistry *History of biotechnology *History of botany *History of ecology *History of genetics *History of evolutionary thought: **Darwinism **The eclipse of Darwinism, Eclipse of Darwinism (Lamarckism, Orthogenesis, Structuralism (biology), Structuralism, and Mutationism) **Modern synthesis (20th century), Modern (evolutionary) synthesis **History of molecular evolution **History of speciation *History of marine biology *History of medicine *History of model organisms *History of molecular biology *Natural history *History of neuroscience *History of plant systematics *History of pathology *History of virology *History of zoology (1859–present), History of zoology Overview *Biology **Science **Life ***Properties: Adaptation – Metabolism, Energy processing – Dev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lamarckism
Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards Evolution of biological complexity, complexity. Introductory textbooks contrast Lamarckism with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. However, Darwin's book ''On the Origin of Species'' gave credence to the idea of heritable effects of use and disuse, as Lamarck had done, and his own concept of pangenesis similarly implied soft inheritance. Many researchers from the 1860s onwards attempted to find evidence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Plant Systematics
The history of plant systematics—the biological classification of plants—stretches from the work of ancient Greek to modern evolutionary biologists. As a field of science, plant systematics came into being only slowly, early plant lore usually being treated as part of the study of medicine. Later, classification and description was driven by natural history and natural theology. Until the advent of the theory of evolution, nearly all classification was based on the scala naturae. The professionalization of botany in the 18th and 19th century marked a shift toward more holistic classification methods, eventually based on evolutionary relationships. Antiquity The peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus (372–287 BC), as a student of Aristotle in Ancient Greece, wrote '' Historia Plantarum'', the earliest surviving treatise on plants, where he listed the names of over 500 plant species.''Concise Encyclopedia Of Science And Technology'', McGraw-Hill He did not articulate a form ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Neuroscience
From the ancient Egyptian mummifications to 18th-century scientific research on "globules" and neurons, there is evidence of neuroscience practice throughout the early periods of history. The early civilizations lacked adequate means to obtain knowledge about the human brain. Their assumptions about the inner workings of the mind, therefore, were not accurate. Early views on the function of the brain regarded it to be a form of "cranial stuffing" of sorts. In ancient Egypt, from the late Middle Kingdom onwards, in preparation for mummification, the brain was regularly removed, for it was the heart that was assumed to be the seat of intelligence. According to Herodotus, during the first step of mummification: "The most perfect practice is to extract as much of the brain as possible with an iron hook, and what the hook cannot reach is mixed with drugs." Over the next five thousand years, this view came to be reversed; the brain is now known to be the seat of intelligence, although co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural History
Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is called a naturalist or natural historian. Natural history encompasses scientific research but is not limited to it. It involves the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms, so while it dates from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and the mediaeval Arabic world, through to European Renaissance naturalists working in near isolation, today's natural history is a cross-discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences; e.g., geobiology has a strong multidisciplinary nature. Definitions Before 1900 The meaning of the English term "natural history" (a calque of the Latin ''historia naturalis'') has narrowed progressively with time, while, by contrast, the meaning of the related term "nature" has widened (see also ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Molecular Biology
The history of molecular biology begins in the 1930s with the convergence of various, previously distinct biological and physical disciplines: biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, virology and physics. With the hope of understanding life at its most fundamental level, numerous physicists and chemists also took an interest in what would become molecular biology. In its modern sense, molecular biology attempts to explain the phenomena of life starting from the macromolecular properties that generate them. Two categories of macromolecules in particular are the focus of the molecular biologist: 1) nucleic acids, among which the most famous is deoxyribonucleic acid (or DNA), the constituent of genes, and 2) proteins, which are the active agents of living organisms. One definition of the scope of molecular biology therefore is to characterize the structure, function and relationships between these two types of macromolecules. This relatively limited definition allows for the estimati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Model Organisms
Model organisms are specific organisms studied to gain knowledge of other organisms, to generalize both within and between species. Model organisms offer standards for comparison of other organisms.Rader, ''Making Mice'', p. 16 Model organism strains are standardized by inbreeding and cloning, to limit genetic variation and create a precise basis for comparison. Some organisms are experimentally convenient and/or important for their history and research community. The idea of the model organism first took root in the middle of the 19th century with the work of scientists like Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel and their respective work on natural selection and the genetics of heredity. Beginning in the early 1900s, laboratory experimentation on '' Drosophila'' was expanded to use tobacco mosaic virus, '' E. coli'', C57BL/6 (lab mice), etc. These organisms have led to many advances in the past century. Preliminary works on model organisms Some of the first work with what would ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Medicine
The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies. The history of medicine is the study and documentation of the evolution of medical treatments, practices, and knowledge over time. Medical historians often draw from other humanities fields of study including economics, Outline of health sciences, health sciences, sociology, and Political science, politics to better understand the institutions, practices, people, professions, and social systems that have shaped medicine. When a period which predates or lacks written sources regarding medicine, information is instead drawn from archaeology, archaeological sources. This field tracks the evolution of human societies' approach to health, illness, and injury ranging from prehistory to the modern day, the events that shape these approaches, and their impact on pop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Marine Biology
Marine biology is a hybrid subject that combines aspects of organismal function, ecological interaction and the study of marine biodiversity. The earliest studies of marine biology trace back to the Phoenicians and the Greeks who are known as the initial explorers of the oceans and their composition."History of the Study of Marine Biology" MarineBio Conservation Society. Retrieved: April 7, 2014. The first recorded observations on the distribution and habits of marine life were made by Aristotle (384–322 BC).Levinton, Jeffrey S.. Marine biology: function, biodiversity, ecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. p.4 Observations made in the earliest studies of marine biology provided an impetus for the age of discovery and exploration tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Speciation
The scientific study of speciation — how species evolve to become new species — began around the time of Charles Darwin in the middle of the 19th century. Many naturalists at the time recognized the relationship between biogeography (the way species are distributed) and the evolution of species. The 20th century saw the growth of the field of speciation, with major contributors such as Ernst Mayr researching and documenting species' geographic patterns and relationships. The field grew in prominence with the modern evolutionary synthesis in the early part of that century. Since then, research on speciation has expanded immensely. The language of speciation has grown more complex. Debate over classification schemes on the mechanisms of speciation and reproductive isolation continue. The 21st century has seen a resurgence in the study of speciation, with new techniques such as molecular phylogenetics and systematics. Speciation has largely been divided into discrete modes tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Molecular Evolution
The history of molecular evolution starts in the early 20th century with "comparative biochemistry", but the field of molecular evolution came into its own in the 1960s and 1970s, following the rise of molecular biology. The advent of protein sequencing allowed molecular biologists to create phylogenies based on sequence comparison, and to use the differences between homologous sequences as a molecular clock to estimate the time since the last common ancestor. In the late 1960s, the neutral theory of molecular evolution provided a theoretical basis for the molecular clock, though both the clock and the neutral theory were controversial, since most evolutionary biologists held strongly to panselectionism, with natural selection as the only important cause of evolutionary change. After the 1970s, nucleic acid sequencing allowed molecular evolution to reach beyond proteins to highly conserved ribosomal RNA sequences, the foundation of a reconceptualization of the early history of life. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern Synthesis (20th Century)
The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on Mendelian inheritance, heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, ''Evolution: The Modern Synthesis''. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian inheritance, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by paleontology, palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local population, populations. The synthesis was defined differently by its founders, with Ernst Mayr in 1959, G. Ledyard Stebbins in 1966, and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1974 offering differing basic postulates, though they all include natural selection, working on heritable variation supplied by mutation. Other major figures in the synthesis included E. B. Ford, Bernhard Rensch, Ivan Schmalhausen, and George Gaylord Simpson. An early event in the modern synthesi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
