Life Scientists Want to Know

Biology, the science of life

The term biology was introduced in Germany in 1800 and popularized by French naturalist Jean-Baptist de Lamark as a means of encompassing the growing number of disciplines involved in the study of living forms. The basic concept of biology received its greatest stimulus from English zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley who was also a prominent educator. Huxley insisted that the conventional segregation of zoology and botany was intellectually unwarrantable and that all living things should be studied in an integrated way. Huxley’s approach to the study of biology is even more cogent today because scientists now realize that many lower organisms are neither plants nor animals. The boundaries of the science, however, have always been difficult to determine and as the scope of biology shifted over the years, its subject areas were changed and reorganized by efforts of hundreds of researchers.

Life Scientists Want to Know

People are different from all other kinds of organisms. We ask questions and we search for answers. We want to know everything about the world we live in. We are especially interested in ourselves and other living things. The science of biology is just that. It is the study of all living things. Life scientists, like most people, are eager to find out about biology. But, because the study of all organisms is so large, many life scientists have become specialists. As each life scientist studies part of the whole of biology, our understanding of organisms grows.

Today, biology is subdivided into hierarchies based on the molecule, the cell, the organism and the population.

Molecular biology, which spans biophysics and biochemistry, has made the most fundamental contributions to modern biology. Much is now known about the structure and action of nucleic acids and proteins, the key molecules of living matter.

Discovery of heredity mechanism was the major breakthrough in modern science. Another important advance understood how molecules conduct metabolism, that is, how they process the energy needed to sustain life.

Cellular biology is closely linked with molecular biology. To understand the functions of the cell, the basic structural unit of living matter, all biologists study its components on the molecular level.

Organismal biology, in turn, is related to cellular biology because the life functions of multicellular organisms are governed by the activities and interactions of their cellular components.

The study of organisms includes their growth and development (developmental biology) and how they function (physiology). Particularly important are investigations of the brain and nervous system (neurophysiology) and animal behavior (ethology).

Population biology became firmly established as a major subdivision of biological studies in 1970. The centre of this field is evolutionary biology in which contributions of Charles Darwin have been fully appreciated after a long period of neglect. Population genetics, the study of gene changes in population in their natural habitants, have established subject areas since the 1930. These two fields where combined in 1960 to form rapidly developing new subject called population biology.

Closely associated is a new direction in animal behavior study called sociobiology which focuses on the genetic contribution to social interactions among animal populations.

Biology also includes the study of human beings on the molecular, cellular and organism levels. If the focus of investigation is the application of biological knowledge to human health, the study is often termed biomedicine. Human populations are not considered within the province biology; instead, they are the subject of anthropology and various social sciences. The boundaries and subdivisions of biology, however, are movable today as they have always been and further shifts may be expected.

Ecology is the study of interactions of organisms with their physical environment and with each other and of the results of such interactions. For the first time, the term ecology was used by German scientist E. Gekkel in 1866 in his work dedicated to morphology of organisms. In literal comprehension, the ecology is the science that studies the interaction in living nature; in other words, it is the science which studies the interaction of living beings with each other and with surrounding inorganic nature, the relations in organism systems, structure and functioning of these systems. Famous American ecologist Eugene Odom defined the ecology as «the biology of environment».

Ecology is consistent part of biology (the science about life). In the family of biological sciences it plays very important role. Ecology belongs to the group of functional biological sciences, the main principles of which are base for such sciences as ecology of plants, ecology of animals etc. At first ecology studied only the relations between living organisms and nonliving nature, but later, when mankind realized its great influence on environment, the notion of ecology became tightly connected with the results of man’s activity.

Thus biology is the base on which the ecology science was developed. In ancient times, first biological knowledge was received by means of simple observations. With passing time some systematic method was created, nature scientists made some conclusions and developed different theories concerning biology.