A Brief History of Biology

The term biology originates from two Greek words that translate to the "study of life" (bios, meaning “life” and logia, meaning "study of"). In one form or another, the study of biology has ancient origins. The ancient civilisations of Egypt and China studied what would be best described as natural philosophy, whilst modern biology with it’s very different structure and approach, originated from ancient Greece, from the times of Aristotle and Hippocrates (400-300BC). Major advances in biology came with the invention of microscopy, which, in the early 19th Century, enabled the scientific discovery of the cell as the basic unit of organisms. Alongside this were significant discoveries in taxonomy and biological classification. An understanding of the origins and evolution of life resulted from the works of Charles Darwin and earlier theories by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whilst it was not until the middle of the 20th Century that major breakthroughs came in our understanding of genetics and DNA as the building-blocks of life.