Medicine was especially well studied by Islamic scholars working in Greek philosopher traditions, while natural history drew heavily on Aristotelian thought, especially in upholding a fixed hierarchy of life.īiology began to quickly develop and grow with Anton van Leeuwenhoek's dramatic improvement of the microscope. Scholars of the medieval Islamic world who wrote on biology included al-Jahiz (781–869), Al-Dīnawarī (828–896), who wrote on botany, and Rhazes (865–925) who wrote on anatomy and physiology.
Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to the plant sciences, even into the Middle Ages. His works such as History of Animals were especially important because they revealed his naturalist leanings, and later more empirical works that focused on biological causation and the diversity of life. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) contributed extensively to the development of biological knowledge. Their contributions later entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity. The earliest of roots of science, which included medicine, can be traced to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Historyĭiagram of a fly from Robert Hooke's innovative Micrographia, 1665 Many other terms used in biology to describe plants, animals, diseases, and drugs have been derived from Greek and Latin due to the historical contributions of the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations as well as the continued use of these two languages in European universities during the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance. The science that concerns itself with these objects we will indicate by the name biology or the doctrine of life. The term came into its modern usage with the six-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802–22) by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, who announced: 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 have been affected. Karl Friedrich Burdach used the term in 1800 in a more restricted sense of the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological and psychological perspective ( Propädeutik zum Studien der gesammten Heilkunst).
In 1797, Theodor Georg August Roose used the term in the preface of a book, Grundzüge der Lehre van der Lebenskraft. The first German use, Biologie, was in a 1771 translation of Linnaeus' work. It was used again in 1766 in a work entitled Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae: tomus III, continens geologian, biologian, phytologian generalis, by Michael Christoph Hanov, a disciple of Christian Wolff. The Latin-language form of the term first appeared in 1736 when Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus ( Carl von Linné) used biologi in his Bibliotheca Botanica. Historically there was another term for biology in English, lifelore it is rarely used today. The first to borrow it was the English and French ( biologie). Despite this, the term βιολογία as a whole didn't exist in Ancient Greek. Those combined make the Greek word βιολογία romanized biología meaning 'biology'. 3.3.7 Genes, development, and evolutionīiology derives from the Ancient Greek words of βίος romanized bíos meaning 'life' and - λογία romanized - logía meaning 'branch of study' or 'to speak'.These various organisms contribute to the biodiversity of an ecosystem, where they play specialized roles in the cycling of nutrients and energy through their biophysical environment. Biologists have sought to study and classify the various forms of life, from prokaryotic organisms such as archaea and bacteria to eukaryotic organisms such as protists, fungi, plants, and animals. Life on Earth, which emerged more than 3.7 billion years ago, is immensely diverse.
Like other scientists, biologists use the scientific method to make observations, pose questions, generate hypotheses, perform experiments, and form conclusions about the world around them.
Hence, there are multiple subdisciplines within biology, each defined by the nature of their research questions and the tools that they use. From the molecular biology of a cell to the anatomy and physiology of plants and animals, and evolution of populations. īiologists are able to study life at multiple levels of organization. Finally, all organisms are able to regulate their own internal environments. Energy processing is also important to life as it allows organisms to move, grow, and reproduce. Another major theme is evolution, which explains the unity and diversity of life. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary information encoded in genes, which can be transmitted to future generations. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field.