České Budějovice, Czech Republic

Physiology and Developmental Biology

Fyziologie a vývojová biologie

Language: Czech Studies in Czech
Subject area: biology
University website: www.jcu.cz
Years of study: 4
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.
Physiology
Physiology (; from Ancient Greek φύσις (physis), meaning 'nature, origin', and -λογία (-logia), meaning 'study of') is the scientific study of normal mechanisms, and their interactions, which work within a living system. A sub-discipline of biology, its focus is in how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. Given the size of the field, it is divided into, among others, animal physiology (including that of humans), plant physiology, cellular physiology, microbial physiology (microbial metabolism), bacterial physiology, and viral physiology.
Biology
No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century.
Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., 1986, Sinauer Associates, p. 15
Biology
You can’t fight biology. Only push at the rules, here and there.
David Brin, Glory Season (1993), chapter 5
Biology
When he meets a simple geometrical construction, for instance in the honeycomb, he would fain refer it to physical instinct, or to skill and ingenuity, rather than to the operation of physical forces or mathematical laws; when he sees in a snail, or nautilus, or tiny foraminiferal or radiolarian shell a close approach to sphere or spiral, he is prone of old habit to believe that after all it is something more than a spiral or a sphere, and that in this "something more" there lies what neither mathematics nor physics can explain. In short, he is deeply reluctant to compare the living with the dead, or to explain by geometry or by mechanics the things which have their part in the mystery of life.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917)
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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