What is Biology?

What is Biology?

Levels of organization

Disciplines

How do we know things?

Perception

Our perception can be very different from reality- think of magicians

The spell of the sensuous by David Abrams

Me’en Tribe of Ethiopia

Picture recognition

Oral Culture

Written culture

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Hieroglyphics

Cuniform writing - simplified about 1000 pictographs to 400 synpols

Alphabet:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

World View

• Frame of reference• Explains how and why• Usually unquestioned

Plato 427 – 347 BCAristotle 384 – 322 BC

• The real world was ideal and perfect

• The perceived world, observed through our senses, was imperfect

• Organisms perfectly adapted (no evolution)

• Scala naturae – ladder of increasing complexity

• Major influence on Europe – lasted for 2000 years

Separation of mind from body

this led to a symbolic and abstract language

I control my body

I grow vegetables

I can manage nature

I has become a bodiless psyche

J-C worldview• Answers to questions sought from people or

texts of authority (sound familiar?)

• By 1300’s Greek philosophy slowly filtered to the ‘west’translated from Greek to Arabic to Latin

• Gutenberg 1397-1468

• Black Death

• Universities and Museums

Rise of the Mechanical World View

• Turning point came in 1543

• Publication of Archimedes• Publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium

Coelestrium by Copernicus• Publication of De Humani Corporis

Fabrica by Vasalius

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Mechanical World View

- Francis Bacon – Novum Organum 1620• humans could and should liberate themselves from

the natural world • objective knowledge • concentrate on the HOW not the WHY

Sir Francis Bacon1561-1626

• Western science• Philosophical system for investigating nature• Did not like deductive reasoning

- accept something as true and then deduce a consequence

• We see what we believe rather than believe what we see.

• Stressed induction – observation (data) and experimentation

• René Descartes (1596-1650) math was the language for understanding the natural world

• Isaac Newton (1642-1727)mechanical motion, gravity

• John Locke (1632-1704)social role of the state was to promote the subjugation of nature, trickle down theory

• Adam Smith (1723-1790)economist “Wealth of Nations”, the Invisible Hand

Science became the means for understanding the natural world.

Technology became the means for ‘controlling’ the natural world.

Mechanical world viewMachine Analogy.

Parts make up wholes; understand the parts and we can understand the whole.

Separation of humans from the rest of nature.

We can manage the machine.