Bielefeld, Germany

Biology - Behaviour: From Neural Mechanisms to Evolution

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: biology
Qualification: Master
Kind of studies: full-time studies
University website: www.uni-bielefeld.de/
Biology
Biology is the natural science that involves the study of life and living organisms, including their physical structure, chemical composition, function, development and evolution. Modern biology is a vast field, composed of many branches. Despite the broad scope and the complexity of the science, there are certain unifying concepts that consolidate it into a single, coherent field. Biology recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity, and evolution as the engine that propels the creation of new species. Living organisms are open systems that survive by transforming energy and decreasing their local entropy to maintain a stable and vital condition defined as homeostasis. See glossary of biology.
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules.
Biology
Today, the central and still fascinating questions for biologists concern the mechanisms by which evolution occurs."
Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology 5th ed. 1989, Worth Publishers, p. 972
Biology
Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.
George Kubler The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 8
Evolution
Even in her transfigured state, the thought of goal-oriented evolution gave Evelyn the creeps. It smacked of Intelligent Design, the ludicrous evangelism of engineers masquerading as biologists, their PowerPoint presentations riddled with evasions and half-truths and pseudoscience. Such thinking confused causes and effects; it complicated unnecessarily the idea of evolution, a field where explanations are valuable only for their parsimony.
Joe Pitkin, A Murmuration of Starlings in Rich Horton (ed.) The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013, p. 367 (Originally published in Analog magazine, June 2012)
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