History of biology

See related Biology

A history of biology does not constitute an evaluation of the veracity of biological ideas. It does not attempt to give answers to the fundamental questions in biology, or even to define those questions. It tries to recognize the myriad ideas of individuals curious about the myriad aspects of the living world, including those individuals whose ideas have all but disappeared from the everyday knowledge base. It tries to follow the path of human curiosity about workings of living things. We will try to heed the words of the editor of the Journal of the History of Biology:

While hard data will always serve as the basis of history, the simple narrative is no longer acceptable, particularly when dealing with the emergence of ideas. The best history will be characterized by penetrating and critical analysis of changing concepts and altered methods of experiment and observation. Biology, in particular, must be studied in terms of its relationships with the other sciences and with the intellectual currents of its day.

Prehistory

An unrecorded history of biology began when prehistoric human foragers first started to accumulate information about the behavior of plants and animals in their environment, which they did for its importance in helping them acquire food for subsistence.

Homo sapiens, emerged nearly 200,000 years ago, exhibiting unprecedented cognitive abilities. They could discriminate cause and effect widely in nature, they could speak and thus share knowledge and cooperatively accumulate it to pass it down the generations, and they could make tools — all prerequisites for a successful study of food sources for immediate practical purposes. Living as hunter-gatherers, they learned the details of the behavior of animals and plants as they needed to subsist and thrive in the wild. How they managed to organize and teach their knowledge we can only speculate. Reports of direct observations of 19th and 20th century hunter-gatherer societies, whose lifestyle resembled them give some appreciation of the likely expertise important for survival required of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Beginning approximately 10,000 years ago, self-expanding biological knowledge in our prehistoric ancestors plausibly played a major role in evolving productivity in agriculture and the domestication of wild animals, beginning independently it seems in the Old and New Worlds. The societal importance of agriculture and animal husbandry encourages experimental work to further develop crop yields and animal productivity-for-human-service in present day biologists, and might have done so throughout the history of human domestication of non-human wild living things.

Aristotle, the founding father of biology

The idea that the phenomena observed in nature resulted from natural causes that humans could potentially discover apparently originated in ancient Greece. C. Leon Harris writes:

All the Greeks had much the same language, religion, and government, but in the sixth century B.C. something peculiar to the shores of Ionia (present-day Turkey) gave rise to a new and bizarre notion. A number of Ionians became obsessed with the heresy that nature is not simply a whim of the gods, but that natural phenomena consistently follow particular causes which men can understand. There is no record of the idea prior to that time, and mankind was apparently cured of the fixation afterward, until it broke out again in the European Renaissance. Now, of course, this epidemic of science has infected us all.

The science of biology begins in the 4th century BCE, with the work and though of Aristotle (384-322 BCE). He learned from earlier Greek thinkers who postulated biological explanations from observations of the everyday world, including:

• Thales of Miletus (640-550 BCE), who posited water as the source of all things, including life;

• Anaxagoras (500-428 BCE), who discovered respiration in animals and plants and attributed human intelligence to the development of bipedalism;

• Empedocles (ca. 445 BCE), who advanced a theory of evolution, attributing it to the combination of natural experiments and natural selection. Aristotle both acknowledges Empedocles’ ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ argument and rejects it on the basis that nature operates for a purpose and does not offer random variations;

• Leucippus (ca. 445 BCE) and Democritus (460-360 BCE), who rejected design in nature and described nature as a machine.

Aristotle was founding father of biology through his lifelong wide-ranging observations of biological phenomena, his experimentation, his organization of information, his writing up reports and teaching students, and his basic philosophy that understanding reality required deductions and inductions from sense experience and not abstract postulations before the fact. He noted that despite the enormous variety of living things, they showed very small gradations from less to more complex forms,

…that life has grown steadily in complexity and in power; that intelligence has progressed in correlation with complexity of structure and mobility of form; that there has been an increasing specialization of function, and a continuous centralization of physiological control.

Aristotle gave some thought to the question, "what is life?". He thought that a living thing existed in 'potentiality' in the seed or semen, that environment factors initiated the realization of that potential, and that that potential included the "nutritive power" to grow into the living thing. Corresponding to that triad of suppositions, though it takes more than semen to generate a human.

Aristotle developed a coherent vision of the nature of living thing. His four components of the causes of complex natural things, anticipates the somewhat more refined modern systems biology approach to the question of life, wherein a living thing comprises:

• A collection of organic and inorganic parts (molecules and ions; cells, organelles, organs and organisms) — Aristotle’s 'material' cause, the parts that make up the living thing; Aristotle only recognized some of the organs;
• Parts relating to each other to form structures (e.g., networks), how they interact with each other (e.g., network dynamics), and how the structures interact with each other in a coordinated dynamic and hierarchical manner — Aristotle’s 'formal' (form-like) cause, the form the living thing takes on from the parts; Aristotle thought in terms of sculpture;
• Parts and structures dynamically coordinated (e.g., gene expression; self-organization) — Aristotle’s 'efficient' (effect-producing) cause, how the living thing gets produced into its form; the moving force; Aristotle thought about something putting it together;
• How the living system as-a-whole functions and behaves, and the properties that characterize it (e.g., reproduction; locomotion; cognition) — Aristotle’s 'final' cause, its function; Aristotle thought in terms of the thing's 'purpose' or 'goal';

Modern biologists go down the road started as a path by Aristotle, who would have been delighted to know he asked the right questions during his pathbreaking studies, even if he did not know how to get the right answers. Unfortunately, the larger fraction of his writings have disappeared, so we cannot know the full breadth of Aristotle's curiosity and biological adumbrations. What he did leave had a major effect on Western thought for centuries.

See also

• Ernst Mayr

Bibliography

• Allen, Garland. Life Science in the Twentieth Century (1975)
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography (2nd ed. 2007)
• Gardner, Eldon J. History of Biology (3rd ed 1986)
• Nordenskiold, Erik. The History of Biology A Survey (1928) 630pp
• Magner, Lois N. A History of the Life Sciences (3rd ed. 2002)
• Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, 1982; advanced history by leading scientistonline edition
• Maienschein, Jane. "History of Biology" Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 1, Historical Writing on American Science. (1985), pp. 147-162. in JSTOR historiography
• Morange, Michel. A History of Molecular Biology (1994)
• Sapp, Jan. Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, 2003 online edition
• Serafini, Anthony. The Epic History of Biology, 2001, 408pp online edition
• Singer, Charles. A History of Biology to about the Year 1900: A General Introduction to the Study of Living Things 1930 online edition
• Woodruff, Lorande Loss. "History of Biology," The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 3. (Mar., 1921), pp. 253-281. in JSTOR, brief history down to Darwin

Primary sources

• Suñer, August Pi, ed. Classics of Biology. Philosophical Library: 1955. 337pp online edition

External links

• Journal of the History of Biology (1963- )