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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.
Evolution captures both the history of an organism via its phylogeny, and the history of natural selection working on function to produce adaptations. [6] There are several reasons why natural selection may fail to achieve optimal design (Mayr 2001:140–143; Buss et al. 1998).
Comparative physiology is a subdiscipline of physiology that studies and exploits the diversity of functional characteristics of various kinds of organisms. It is closely related to evolutionary physiology and environmental physiology. Many universities offer undergraduate courses that cover comparative aspects of animal physiology.
He was a popularizer of natural history. His Nomenclator Zoologicus (1842–1847) was a pioneering effort. 1840. Jan Evangelista Purkyně, a Czech physiologist in Wrocław proposes that the word "protoplasm" be applied to the formative material of young animal embryos. 1842 Plate from Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle by Charles d ...
In biology, evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization , from kingdoms to species , and individual organisms and molecules , such as DNA and proteins .
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of organisms have responded to natural selection or sexual selection or changed by random genetic drift across multiple generations during the history of a population or species. [2]
Biology of non-human organisms was generally only written about in the context of mainstream academic disciplines. Animal physiology was studied extensively for the purpose of divination ; the anatomy of the liver , which was seen as an important organ in haruspicy , was studied in particularly intensive detail.
The History of Animals contains many accurate eye-witness observations, in particular of the marine biology around the island of Lesbos, such as that the octopus had colour-changing abilities and a sperm-transferring tentacle, that the young of a dogfish grow inside their mother's body, or that the male of a river catfish guards the eggs after ...