We explain what the history of biology is like, its first antecedents, its relationship with the scientific revolution and main figures.
The discoveries of scientists like Louis Pasteur changed the way of thinking about life.What is the history of biology?
The history of the biology is, at the same time, the recount and study of the development of this scientific discipline, dedicated as its name indicates (from the Greek bios, "life and logos, "Knowledge" or "discourse") to the understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics of the life as we know it.
The term "biology" was coined in the 19th century, when in 1802 both the French Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and the German Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776-1837) published independent works that proposed the common use of biology. word. Thus they founded a complete science, following the spirit of Illustration European.
However, the proper study of the laws of life dates back to the earliest naturalistic philosophers of life. Antiquity. Thus, what today we call biology, for centuries was known as natural philosophy or natural history, and therefore those who dedicated themselves to its study were called "philosophers" or "naturalists."
Biology Background
It is difficult to mark a starting point in the history of biology, since the interest of the human being by the functioning and needs of animals and plants has always accompanied us, especially since the Neolithic Revolution, when the farming It became part of our lives and it became essential to know more about them.
Thus, the different ancient civilizations began the study of life, without distinguishing between anatomy human, zoology, botany, chemistry, physical, etc.
There were many famous scholars of the body and life in ancient times, such as Suruta (c. 3rd century BC), one of the wise founders of traditional Indian medicine, surgeon and author of the treatise Súsruta-samija; or the later Zhang Zhong Jin (150-209 AD), of the school of ancient Chinese medicine. Each one was inscribed in a vast tradition cultural, religious and philosophical that supported a vision of the world and of life itself.
In the West, there are also pre-Socratic Egyptian and Greek equivalents, but the most famous student of life was the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Estagira (384-322 BC). Among his many works is the first classification of the organisms of which there is a record, and the analysis and description of around 500 different species animals.
The Aristotelian model of thought was of such importance that it was improved and expanded by naturalists and physicians of later times, thus surviving beyond the Middle Ages. At that time, as the West plunged into obscurantism and religious fanaticism, the Golden Age of Islam took place between the 8th and 9th centuries (AD), with great contributions to biology and medicine.
Nothing else in zoology, highlighted the Arab Al-Jahiz (781-869), who described some of the first ideas around evolutionism and the struggle for survival through the food chain; the Kurdish Al-Dinawari (828-896), one of the founders of botany and a scholar of more than 637 different species of plants; and the Persian Al-Biruni (973-1048), creator of the concept of artificial selection and one of the precursors of evolutionism.
The West contributed little during the High Middle Ages to the advancement of biology, although there were contributions to the matter in European universities, such as Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Albert the Great (1193-1280) or Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194-1250). But compared to the interest in physics and chemistry in Europe, biology received little attention at the time.
Biology in the Scientific Revolution
This changed radically with the arrival of the Renaissance and the Modern age. The renewed Western interest in the natural sciences and physiologyAs well as modern medicine, it was largely due to a new form of philosophical thought, characterized by empiricism and reason. There were great contributions to botany in the form of studies of herbalism, and to zoology through numerous bestiaries.
Thanks to advances in physics and optics, the invention of microscope allowed at the end of the 16th century the first study with illustrations of the first cells: Micrographia by the British Robert Hooke (1635-1703).
Subsequently, the improvements introduced by the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) to the microscope allowed an even greater leap forward: the observation and description of the vast and complex microscopic life, as well as its relation to macroscopic life, through of the discovery of bacteria, sperm and other protozoa.
As if that were not enough, at that time the first steps were taken in the development of the paleontology, initially as a form of debate regarding the biblical universal flood.
The Danish Nicolas Steno (1638-1686) described the first fossils and fossilization procedures. Thus he laid the groundwork for the much later theories of evolution and for the very concept of extinction, which in the seventeenth century was unthinkable because it contravened religious ideas about the origin of life.
Modern biology
Biology began to take its first steps as an independent field of knowledge at the end of the 18th century, after great advances were made in the observation and dissection of animals, and especially after the famous Swedish naturalist Carlos Linnaeus (1707-1778 ) proposed his basic taxonomy for the natural world.
His vision of the organization of kingdoms of life made Aristotle's obsolete. In addition, Linnaeus proposed a system for naming species that we still use today, consisting of two Latin terms (genus and species): Homo sapiens, for example.
Thus, in the nineteenth century, what was formerly physiology had come to be called medicine; and what were natural history and natural philosophy were giving way to an immense set of more specialized knowledge: bacteriology, morphology, embryology, etc.
Even the geology and the geography they began to emancipate their fields of learning, thanks in large part to the long study tours of naturalists of the stature of the German Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and the French Aimé Bonpland (1773-1858), among many others.
Another important quantum leap occurred around the debate on the origin of life and evolutionary theory. The first theory of evolution It came from the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and, later, the British Charles Darwin (1809-1882), responsible for the basic theory that we handle today. Your book The origin of species 1859 is considered the most important event in the modern history of biology.
From then on, the knowledge of biology did not stop growing exponentially, helped to a great extent by the new inventions and possibilities that the Industrial Revolution. Great and revolutionary contributions to the field were made thanks to:
- Gregor Mendell (1822-1884) with his findings on the laws of inheritance genetics.
- Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) with his studies in embryology and ecology.
- Mathias Schleiden (1804-1881) and Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) with their studies on the cell as the fundamental unit of all living beings.
- Robert Koch (1843-1910) with the first cultures of bacteria in a Pietri dish.
- Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) with his refutation of the Theory of spontaneous generation (and the invention of the pasteurization method).
- Thomas Morgan (1866-1945) with his demonstration that chromosomes they were the carriers of genetic information.
- Aleksander Oparin (1894-1980) with his Theory about the origin of life, published in his book The origin of life on Earth .
- James Watson (1928-) and Francis Crick (1916-2004) for their 1953 discovery of the DNA structure, based on the work of Maurice Wilkins (1899-1986) and Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958).
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, advances in biology have not stopped, but are too numerous to attempt to list. Biology is no longer just a field of consolidated scientific knowledge, but is expanding towards new horizons: with space exploration, biology makes contributions to discover life outside of our planet (exobiology) or, in any case, to understand how it originated in ours (paleobiology).