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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.
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 .
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
c. 520 BC – Alcmaeon of Croton distinguished veins from arteries and discovered the optic nerve. c. 450 BC – Sushruta wrote the Sushruta Samhita, redacted versions of which, by the third century AD, describe over 120 surgical instruments and 300 surgical procedures, classify human surgery into eight categories, and introduce cosmetic surgery.
5th century BC: The Greeks start experimenting with straightedge-and-compass constructions. [30] 5th century BC: The earliest documented mention of a spherical Earth comes from the Greeks in the 5th century BC. [31] It is known that the Indians modeled the Earth as spherical by 300 BC [32] 460 BC: Empedocles describes thermal expansion. [33]
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
As duplex DNA became the predominant form of the genetic material, the mechanism of genetic recovery evolved into the more complex process of meiotic recombination, found today in most species. It thus appears likely that sexual reproduction arose early in the evolution of cells and has had a continuous evolutionary history.
French physician Pierre Fauchard started dentistry science as we know it today, and he has been named "the father of modern dentistry". Surgeon Ambroise Paré was a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine , especially the treatment of wounds , [ 93 ] and Herman Boerhaave is sometimes referred to as a "father of physiology ...