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The idea of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, but evolutionary biology, as an academic discipline in its own right, emerged during the period of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. [8] It was not until the 1980s that many universities had departments of evolutionary biology.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
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.
In 1801, he published Système des animaux sans vertèbres, a major work on the classification of invertebrates, a term which he coined. [6] In an 1802 publication, he became one of the first to use the term "biology" in its modern sense. [7] [Note 1] Lamarck continued his work as a premier authority on invertebrate zoology.
The term evolution is widely used, but the term evolutionism is not used in the scientific community to refer to evolutionary biology as it is redundant and anachronistic. [ 6 ] However, the term has been used by creationists in discussing the creation–evolution controversy . [ 6 ]
Darwinism subsequently referred to the specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann barrier, or the central dogma of molecular biology. [2] Though the term usually refers strictly to biological evolution, creationists have appropriated it to refer to the origin of life or to cosmic evolution, that are distinct to biological evolution, [3] and therefore consider it to be the belief and ...
Biology is the scientific study of life. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] For instance, all organisms are composed of at least one cell that processes hereditary information encoded in genes , which can be transmitted ...
The term "taxonomy" was coined by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle [4] while the term "systematic" was coined by Carl Linnaeus the father of taxonomy. [ citation needed ] Taxonomy, systematic biology, systematics, biosystematics, scientific classification, biological classification, phylogenetics: At various times in history, all these words have ...