Biology is the science that studies life, or the physical and chemical processes of the phenomena that characterize living systems, including their biochemistry,
molecular mechanisms, genetics, anatomy, physiology, as well as emergent processes such as adaptation, development, evolution, interaction between organisms,
and behavior. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field.
Despite the high complexity of the discipline, there are some unifying concepts within it that regulate its study and research: biology in fact recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life,
the genes as the basic structure of heredity and Darwinian evolution by natural selection as the process that regulates the birth and extinction of species.
All living organisms, both unicellular and multicellular, are open systems that survive by transforming energy and decreasing the local entropy of the system to regulate their internal environment and maintain a stable and vital condition called homeostasis.
Biology conducts research using the scientific method to test the validity of a theory in a rational, unbiased, and reproducible manner which consists of hypothesis formation, experimentation, and data analysis to establish the validity or invalidity of a scientific theory.
The subdisciplines of biology are defined by the investigative approach and the type of system studied: theoretical biology uses mathematical methods to formulate quantitative
models while experimental biology carries out empirical experiments to test the validity of proposed theories and advance human knowledge regarding mechanisms underlying
life and how it appeared and evolved from non-living matter about 4 billion years ago through a gradual increase in the complexity of the system. See sectors of biology.
History of biology
The term biology derives from the Greek word βιολογία, composed of βίος, bìos = “life” and λόγος, lògos = study.
The Latin form of the term made its first appearance in 1736, when Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) used “biologi” in his Bibliotheca botanica.
This term was used again thirty years later, in 1766, in a work entitled Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae: tomus III, continens geologian, biologyn, phytologian generali, written by Michael Christoph Hanov, a disciple of Christian Wolff.
The first usage in German, Biologie, was used in a 1771 translation of Linnaeus’ work. In 1797, Theodor Georg August Roose used this term in the preface of the book Grundzüge der Lehre van der Lebenskraft.
Karl Friedrich Burdach used it in 1800 with a narrower meaning to the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological and psychological point of view (Propädeutik zum Studien der gesammten Heilkunst).
The term therefore entered modern use thanks to the six-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802-1822) by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, which stated:
«The objects of our research will be the different forms and manifestations of life, the conditions and laws under which these phenomena occur and the causes through which they were brought about.
The science that deals with these objects is referred to as biology [Biologie] or doctrine of life [Lebenslehre].»
Although modern biology developed relatively recently, the sciences related to and understood within it have been studied since ancient times.
The study of natural philosophy was approached starting from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indian subcontinent and China.
However, the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature can often be traced back to ancient Greece,
while the formal study of medicine dates back to Hippocrates of Kos (circa 460 BC – approx. 370 BC). The philosopher and mathematician Thales (624 BC – 548 BC) was the first to understand that many phenomena did not have divine origins.
The philosophers of the Ionian school, of which Thales is considered the founder, maintained that every event had a cause, without a will external to the world being able to intervene. But it was Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) who contributed most to the development of this discipline.
Particularly important are his “Animal History” and other works in which he showed interest in nature. Successor of Aristotle at the Lyceum,
Theophrastus dedicated a series of books to botany which represented the most important contribution of antiquity to plant sciences until after the Middle Ages.
Medieval Islamic scholars who worked on biology included: al-Jāḥiẓ (781-869), Al-Dinawari (828-896) who worked on botany, and Rhazes (865-925) who wrote about anatomy and to physiology.
Medicine was well explored by Islamic scholars who worked on translations of Greek texts and Aristotelian thought had a great influence on natural history, especially in supporting a fixed hierarchy of life.
