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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 and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This ancient work was further developed in the Middle Ages by Muslim physicians and scholars such as Avicenna. During the European Renaissance and early modern period, biological thought was revolutionized in Europe by a renewed interest in empiricism and the discovery of many novel organisms. Prominent in this movement were Vesalius and Harvey, who used experimentation and careful observation in physiology, and naturalists such as Linnaeus and Buffon who began to classify the diversity of life and the fossil record, as well as the development and behavior of organisms. Microscopy revealed the previously unknown world of microorganisms, laying the groundwork for cell theory. The growing importance of natural theology, partly a response to the rise of mechanical philosophy, encouraged the growth of natural history (although it entrenched the argument from design). Over the 18th and 19th centuries, biological sciences such as botany and zoology became increasingly professional scientific disciplines. Lavoisier and other physical scientists began to connect the animate and inanimate worlds through physics and chemistry. Explorer-naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt investigated the interaction between organisms and their environment, and the ways this relationship depends on geography—laying the foundations for biogeography, ecology and ethology. Naturalists began to reject essentialism and consider the importance of extinction and the mutability of species. Cell theory provided a new perspective on the fundamental basis of life. These developments, as well as the results from embryology and paleontology, were synthesized in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The end of the 19th century saw the fall of spontaneous generation and the rise of the germ theory of disease, though the mechanism of inheritance remained a mystery. In the early 20th century, the rediscovery of Mendel's work led to the rapid development of genetics by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students, and by the 1930s the combination of population genetics and natural selection in the "neo-Darwinian synthesis". New disciplines developed rapidly, especially after Watson and Crick proposed the structure of DNA. Following the establishment of the Central Dogma and the cracking of the genetic code, biology was largely split between ''organismal biology''—the fields that deal with whole organisms and groups of organisms—and the fields related to ''cellular and molecular biology''. By the late 20th century, new fields like genomics and proteomics were reversing this trend, with organismal biologists using molecular techniques, and molecular and cell biologists investigating the interplay between genes and the environment, as well as the genetics of natural populations of organisms. ==Etymology of "biology"== The word ''biology'' is formed by combining the Greek βίος (bios), meaning "life", and the suffix '-logy', meaning "science of", "knowledge of", "study of", based on the Greek verb λέγειν, 'legein' "to select", "to gather" (cf. the noun λόγος, 'logos' "word"). The term ''biology'' in its modern sense appears to have been introduced independently by Thomas Beddoes (in 1799),〔 〕 Karl Friedrich Burdach (in 1800), Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (''Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur'', 1802) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (''Hydrogéologie'', 1802).〔Junker ''Geschichte der Biologie'', p8.〕〔Coleman, ''Biology in the Nineteenth Century'', pp 1–2.〕 The word itself appears in the title of Volume 3 of Michael Christoph Hanow's ''Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae dogmaticae: Geologia, biologia, phytologia generalis et dendrologia'', published in 1766. Before ''biology'', there were several terms used for the study of animals and plants. ''Natural history'' referred to the descriptive aspects of biology, though it also included mineralogy and other non-biological fields; from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the unifying framework of natural history was the ''scala naturae'' or Great Chain of Being. ''Natural philosophy'' and ''natural theology'' encompassed the conceptual and metaphysical basis of plant and animal life, dealing with problems of why organisms exist and behave the way they do, though these subjects also included what is now geology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Physiology and (botanical) pharmacology were the province of medicine. ''Botany'', ''zoology'', and (in the case of fossils) ''geology'' replaced ''natural history'' and ''natural philosophy'' in the 18th and 19th centuries before ''biology'' was widely adopted.〔Mayr, ''The Growth of Biological Thought'', pp36–37〕〔Coleman, ''Biology in the Nineteenth Century'', pp 1–3.〕 To this day, "botany" and "zoology" are widely used, although they have been joined by other sub-disciplines of biology, such as mycology and molecular biology. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of biology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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