Portal:History of science/Article/Week 37, 2006
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The history of biology traces man's understanding of the living world from the earliest recorded history to modern times. Though the concept of biology as a single coherent field of knowledge only arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to the ancient Greeks (particularly Galen and Aristotle, respectively).
During the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, renewed interest in empiricism as well as the rapidly increasing number of known organisms led to significant developments in biological thought; Vesalius inaugurated the rise of experimentation and careful observation in physiology, and a series of naturalists culminating with Linnaeus and Buffon began to create a conceptual framework for analyzing the diversity of life and the fossil record, as well as the development and behavior of plants and animals. The growing importance of natural theology—partly a response to the rise of mechanical philosophy—was also an important impetus for the growth of natural history (though it also further entrenched the argument from design).
In the 18th century many fields of science—including botany, zoology, and geology—began to professionalize, forming the precursors of scientific disciplines in the modern sense (though the process would not be complete until the late 1800s). Lavoisier and other physical scientists began to connect the animate and inanimate worlds through the techniques and theory of physics and chemistry. Into the 19th century, explorer-naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt tried to elucidate the interactions between organisms and their environment, and the ways these relationships depend on geography—creating the foundations for biogeography, ecology and ethology. Many naturalists began to reject essentialism and seriously consider the possibilities of extinction and the mutability of species. These developments, as well as the results of new fields such as embryology and paleontology, were synthesized in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The end of the 19th century saw debates over spontaneous generation and the rise of the germ theory of disease and the fields of cytology, bacteriology and physiological chemistry, though the problem of inheritance was still a mystery.
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