The History of biological science

Made by: Xeny Dubrovina Section 412

Origin of biology
The term biology in its modern sense was introduced independently in the beginning of the 19 century by: Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800); Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1802); Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1802).

The word itself appears in the title of Michael Christoph Hanov's paper published in 1766.

What was before it?

Natural history

Natural philosophy

Botany, Zoology

Prehistoric development

Human knowledge of biology began with prehistoric people and their experiences with edible vs. inedible, or even poisonous plants, habits of animals and how best to capture them, etc. This information was verbally passed on to the next generation. People knew about medicinal and poisonous plants and knew that a heartbeat meant that someone or some animal was alive. They knew that babies were in some way connected with sexual intercourse. Early on, much basic knowledge had been accumulated by the Egyptians and Babylonians. They began writing down this knowledge to preserve it and communicate it to those who followed after.

First branches
Zoology Botany Medicine

Biology

Anaximander, a Greek philosopher who lived from 611 to 546 BC, is credited with the first written work on natural science, a classical poem entitled On Nature. In this poem, he presented what may be the first written theory of evolution. He said that in the beginning there was a fish-like creature with scales etc. that arose in and lived in the world ocean. As some of these advanced, they moved onto land, shed their scaly coverings, and became the first humans.

Hippocrates lived from about 400 to 300 BC. 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) plus four fluids or humors: sanguis or blood, produced by the heart; choler or yellow bile, produced by the liver; melancholia or black bile, produced by the spleen; and phlegma or phlegm, produced by the brain, which corresponded with these.

The father of biology

Aristotle, one of Platos most famous pupils, lived from 343 to 322 BC, and contributed much to what we now consider to be in the realm of biology. His refinements of the systems of animal and plant classification have profoundly influenced the course of biological thought ever since. His classification system included what he called the Scala naturae, the scale of nature. He said that all organisms are arranged in a hierarchy from simplest to most complex.

The Hierarchical Scale the Great Chain of Being according to Aristotle extended further by various Religions

Biology did nor fare well during the Middle Ages. The Arabs were more interested in astronomy and chemistry and neglected the study of biology. The Western world was absorbed with Christianity, so science in general was not advanced. It is not until the Renaissance that the study of biology was reawakened.

In the early 17th century, the microworld of biology was just beginning to open up. A few lensmakers and natural philosophers had been creating crude microscopes since the late 16th century, and Robert Hooke published the paper based on observations with his own compound microscope in 1665. But it was not until Antony van Leeuwenhoek's dramatic improvements in lensmaking beginning in the 1670s ultimately producing up to 200-fold magnification with a single lensthat scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria and the sheer strangeness and diversity of microscopic life.

Carolus Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in 1735 (variations of which have been in use ever since), and in the 1750s introduced scientific names for all his species. While Linnaeus conceived of species as unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy, the other great naturalist of the 18th century, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleableeven suggesting the possibility of common descent. Though he was opposed to evolution, Buffon is a key figure in the history of evolutionary thought.

Systema naturae
Kingdom
Phylum (pl. = phyla)

Class Order Family

Genus (pl = genera)

Species

Taxonomy
Evolution Theory

Cytology

Biology

Evolution theory
In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of

Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, more commonly known as The Origin of Species. He made 4 main point there:
individuals, even siblings, in a population vary (there is variation), these variations can be passed to offspring (are inherited), (from Malthus) more offspring are produced than the environment can support, so there is competition for resources, and those individuals whose characteristics make them best suited to the environment live and reproduce and have more offspring (survival of the fittest).

In 1865, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, published a paper on genetics that earned him the nickname the Father of Modern Genetics. It wasnt until 1900 that a couple of botanists working on other research rediscovered his work.

In 1928, while studying influenza, Alexander Fleming noticed that mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ. The mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Fleming experimented further and named the active substance penicillin. It was two other scientists however, Australian Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who developed penicillin further so that it could be produced as a drug. At first supplies of penicillin were very limited, but by the 1940s it was being mass-produced by the American drugs industry.

In 1936, Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, a Russian scientist, published The Origins of Life, in which he described hypothetical conditions which he felt would have been necessary for life to first come into existence on early Earth. This included an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, and other gases, much volcanic activity, lightening, and warm soil and water temperatures.

In 1953, James Watson, an American, and Francis Crick, an Englishman, published a paper in which they proposed a hypothetical structure for DNA which also showed how DNA could be the genetic code material and suggested a means whereby it could replicate itself. Subsequent chemical analyses of DNA have upheld their prediction.

Physiology Histology Embriology

Morphology

Cytology

Anatomy

Taxonomy

Botany

Ecology

Zoology

Biology

Genetics