BIOLOGY

1. Biology is the study of living things and their vital processes. The field deals with all the physicochemical aspects of life. Because biology is such a broad subject, it has been subdivided into separate branches for convenience of study. Despite apparent differences, all these subdivisions are interrelated by the basic principles that underlie all biological manifestations. The current approach to the study of living things is based on the levels of biological organization involved – whether molecules, cells, individuals, or populations – and on the specific subject matter under investigation – e.g., structure and function, types and classification, and growth and development. The study of the individual organism as a whole (organismic biology) dominated biology until the invention of the compound microscope (17^th century) and the consequent rise of cell biology.

2. Because each of the aforementioned levels is still too broad to be easily grasped by any one individual, a number of subdivisions have arisen over time. These include morphology, the study of the shape and structure of plants and animals; physiology, the study of the functions of cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems in living things; taxonomy, which attempts to classify living things into groups according to observed natural or hypothetical relationships; embryology, which is concerned with the formation and development of the embryo in plants and animals; genetics, which is the study of inheritance and variation in organisms and the mechanisms by which these processes operate; and ecology, the study of organisms and their interactions with other organisms and their environment.

3. Each of these subdivisions, in turn, can be further subdivided: morphology, for example, is divided into anatomy, which is the study of structures that can be observed with the naked eye; histology, the study of microscopic structure; and cytology, the study of the particular minutiae of cellular structure.

4. There has also been an overlapping of the field of biology with other scientific disciplines; for instance, the modern principles of chemistry and physics are integrated with those of biology in biochemistry and biophysics, respectively. Molecular biology, which studies the chemical structures and processes of biological phenomena at the molecular level, draws on several disciplines and has become one of the most important biological sciences.

5. In another approach of classification, a field of biology may be especially concerned with the investigation of one type of living thing – e.g., botany, the study of plants; zoology, the study of animals; ornithology, the study of birds; ichthyology, the study of fishes; herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles; entomology, the study of insects; mycology, the study of fungi; microbiology, the study of microorganisms; protozoology, the study of protozoa; and bacteriology, the study of bacteria.

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