History of Biology

Catalog description

History of Biology is an exploration of the history that led to our current biological knowledge. The course is organized chronologically from the Antiquity to the end of the 20th century, focusing on the development of ideas such as life, life functions (such as respiration), structure (animal and plant anatomy), diversity (species), generation (reproduction and inheritance), embryological development, and evolution. The course involves commenting on original writings by the most influential life scientists, such as Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, Vesalius, Harvey, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel, Morgan, and Watson & Crick, spanning more than 2,500 years. Students are required to read those original writings prior to every lecture. A special emphasis is laid on the development of theories which are the foundations of our current biological knowledge (such as macromolecules, the cell, and the evolutionary theory). The history of biology is placed within a broader historical and cultural context: a great deal of time is dedicated to explain what was happening in each historical period beyond life sciences (e.g., the rise of the first universities in the early 1200s in the Latin West, the impact of the scientific revolution in the early modern period, and the characteristics of the Enlightenment); scientists and institutions from many different periods and countries are studied. A first course objective is the review of the historical development of the most important foundations of biology, such as macromolecules, the cell, inheritance, evolution, metabolism, biodiversity, and ecosystems. This objective will directly help biology majors to gain a deeper appreciation for the history that led to our current knowledge. Starting with the Antiquity is essential because, up the 19th century, knowledge found in books was as important as knowledge obtained from actual observations, and thus many ideas have transcended the centuries. For instance, Harvey justifies his revolutionary discovery of blood circulation by the very old Aristotelian idea that a circular motion is perfect; hence the necessity of exploring in depth Aristotle's ideas; not to mention that Darwin (who had the deepest admiration for Aristotle) struggled for a long time with the notion of perfection in living organisms, and proposed an answer which is of the utmost importance to understand the depth of his evolutionary theory. A second objective is for students to understand the interplay between observations, theories, experiments, and techniques. So, this objective will help students understand science as a process, how scientific knowledge is built: for instance, the development of the cell theory has been dependent on the emergence of new microscopic techniques, and the development of the evolutionary theory has been dependent on the slow accumulation of observations in comparative anatomy, geology, species classification, and geographical distribution; and, obviously, theories play an absolute key role because only theories help make sense of observations. A third objective in this course is to appreciate and understand past theories and ideas with a humble, non-judgmental, and unbiased approach, keeping in mind that past scholars were not necessarily "wrong." Indeed, it is more enriching to try to understand why scientists believed in one particular theory instead of others, why they thought it was correct even though it is not. Hence the necessity of doing the most difficult thing there is in the history of science, i.e., putting ourselves in the mind of scientists of the past. The course explores many examples of theories that were once believed to be correct by everyone, or nearly everyone, and later abandoned. Overall, this course will remind students of the importance to always remain open-minded and creative in the sciences, as history shows that only those who did not fear being "wrong" occasionally ended up getting things right.