History of biology
- See related Biology
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 in the living world —cognitive abilities enabling them to operate as observational scientists of the type later referred to as ‘natural philosophers’ or ‘naturalists’. 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 naturalist focusing on the study of food sources for immediate practical purposes. Living as hunter-gatherers, so successfully that their descendants (over)populate the world today, 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 our prehistoric ancestors, give some appreciation of the likely expertise important for survival required of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.[1]
Beginning approximately 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, humans domesticated animals (especially dogs and sheep), and started to plant and harvest crops.
Aristotle, the founding father of biology
Biology as a science begins in the 4th century BCE, but before that several civilizations, such as Egypt and Babylon, had developed medicine, which provided a basis for biology. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was the first major scientist to study biology. 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;[2][3]
- 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.[4] 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.[5] Corresponding to that triad of suppositions, though it takes more than semen to generate a human.[6]
Aristotle developed a coherent vision of the nature of living thing. His four components of the causes of complex natural things,[7] [8] 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.
Bibliography
- Eldon J. Gardner. History of Biology (3rd ed 1986)
- Lois N. Magner. A History of the Life Sciences (3rd ed. 2002)
- Ernst Mayr; The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance Belknap Press, 1982 online edition
- Emanuel RÁdl. The History of Biological Theories Oxford University Press, 1930, 408pp online edition
- Jan Sapp; Genesis: The Evolution of Biology Oxford University Press, 2003 online edition
- Anthony Serafini; The Epic History of Biology, Basic Books, 2001, 408pp online edition
- Charles Singer; A History of Biology to about the Year 1900: A General Introduction to the Study of Living Things Abelard-Schuman, 1959 online edition
Primary sources
- Suñer, August Pi, ed. Classics of Biology. Philosophical Library: 1955. 337pp online edition
References
Citations and Notes
- ↑ See sampling of such studies:
- Lee RB, DeVore I. (1968) Man the Hunter. Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago.
- Woodburn J (1968) An introduction to Hadza ecology. In: Man the Hunter. Editors: Lee RB and DeVore I. Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago.
- Tanaka J (1976) Subsistence ecology of Central Kalahari San. In: Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers. Editors: Lee RB and DeVore I. Harvard Universty Press, Cambridge.
- Hawkes K, Hill K, O'Connell J. (1982) Why hunters gather, optimal foraging theory and the Ache of Eastern Ache Paraguay. American Ethnologist 9:379-398
- O'Dea K, White NG, Sinclair AJ. (1988) An investigation of nutrition-related risk factors in an isolated Aboriginal community in northern Australia: advantages of a traditionally-orientated life-style. Med J Aust 148:177-180 PMID 3277018
- Milton K, Knight CD, Crowe I. (1991) Comparative Aspects of Diet in Amazonian Forest-Dwellers. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 334:253-263
- Hill K, Hurtado M, HurtadoA.M. (1996) Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People (Foundations of Human Behavior). Aldine De Gruyter.
- ↑ Aristotle (350 BCE) Physics Book II Part 8 (Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye)
- ”We must explain then (1) that Nature belongs to the class of causes which act for the sake of something; (2) about the necessary and its place in physical problems... A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows... Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity-the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food-since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his 'man-faced ox-progeny' did. Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true... It is plain then that nature is a cause, a cause that operates for a purpose.” (Emphasis added)
- ↑ University of California Museum of Paleontology Evolution and Paleontology in the Ancient World
- ↑ Aristotle. Prior Analytics. In: Aristotle Selections. Fine G, Irwin T, translators. Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis. 1995 ISBN 0872203395
- Full-Text available online with subscription Questia Media America, Inc. http://www.questia.com
- ↑ Aristotle. The Generation of Animals. In. Ruse M (editor) Philosophy of Biology. Prometheus Books, New York. 1998 ISBN 1-57392-185-8
- ↑ Note: For a more extensive discussion, from a feminist perspective, of Aristotle’s views of the respective roles of men and women in the biology of reproduction, see:
- Tuana N. (1994) Aristotle and the Politics of Reproduction. In: Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle. Bat-Ami Bar On (editor). State University of New York Press. Albany, NY.
- ↑ Andrea Falcon (2006) Aristotle on Causality
- ↑ Bothwell JHF. (2006) The long past of systems biology. New Phytologist 170:6-10 Link to Full-Text.
Note: We might interpret Aristotle's four components of 'causality' as four components of 'explanation', for as Bothwell writes: “Aristotle (384-322 BC) wanted to search for explanations of natural events that inspire wonder. His search led him to conclude that any question which might be asked about the behaviour of a complex, apparently designed, system might be answered if we knew four properties of that system. He called these the aitiai, a word which is usually rendered into English as 'causes', but which may be better translated as 'explanations' (Aristotle, APst 90a7-94b34; CA 715a1-17 [Aristotle. APst (Posterior Analytics), Trans: H. Tredennick (1960). Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library. (ISBN 0-674-99430-2)]).”