Klosterneuburg, Austria

Evolutionary Biology

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: biology
University website: www.ist.ac.at
Biology
Biology is the natural science that involves the study of life and living organisms, including their physical structure, chemical composition, function, development and evolution. Modern biology is a vast field, composed of many branches. Despite the broad scope and the complexity of the science, there are certain unifying concepts that consolidate it into a single, coherent field. Biology recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity, and evolution as the engine that propels the creation of new species. Living organisms are open systems that survive by transforming energy and decreasing their local entropy to maintain a stable and vital condition defined as homeostasis. See glossary of biology.
Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth, starting from a single common ancestor. These processes include natural selection, common descent, and speciation.
Biology
I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.
Rachel Carson Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute
Biology
Today, the central and still fascinating questions for biologists concern the mechanisms by which evolution occurs."
Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology 5th ed. 1989, Worth Publishers, p. 972
Biology
Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.
George Kubler The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 8
Understanding the relationship between climate and ecosystems is crucial to preventing undesired changes to our environment, such as desertification and the loss of species. However, the multi-component and multi-scale nature of ecosystems makes them difficult to easily understand.
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