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Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection , yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism .
The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to Ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
The cell is the basic structural and functional unit of all forms of life. Every cell consists of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane; many cells contain organelles, each with a specific function. The term comes from the Latin word cellula meaning 'small room'. Most cells are only visible under a microscope.
From these conclusions about plants and animals, two of the three tenets of cell theory were postulated. 1. All living organisms are composed of one or more cells 2. The cell is the most basic unit of life. Schleiden's theory of free cell formation through crystallization was refuted in the 1850s by Robert Remak, Rudolf Virchow, and Albert ...
Aristotle's biology is the theory of biology, grounded in systematic observation and collection of data, mainly zoological, embodied in Aristotle's books on the science. Many of his observations were made during his stay on the island of Lesbos , including especially his descriptions of the marine biology of the Pyrrha lagoon, now the Gulf of ...
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, [1] to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism".
A mathematical example of "survival of the fittest" is given by Haldane in his paper "The Cost of Natural Selection". [62] Haldane called this process "substitution" or more commonly in biology, this is called "fixation". This is correctly described by the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype.
The development of molecular biology was not just the fruit of some sort of intrinsic "necessity" in the history of ideas, but was a characteristically historical phenomenon, with all of its unknowns, imponderables and contingencies: the remarkable developments in physics at the beginning of the 20th century highlighted the relative lateness in ...