Zoology is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems. The term is derived from Ancient Greek ζῷον, zōion ('animal'), and λόγος, logos.
Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea in 1977 by phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique he pioneered that revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
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. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek revealed by means of microscopy 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.
Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. Ruse currently teaches at Florida State University.
Robert Helmer MacArthur was a Canadian-born American ecologist who made a major impact on many areas of community and population ecology.
Marjorie Glicksman Grene was an American philosopher. She wrote both on existentialism and the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of biology. She taught at the University of California at Davis from 1965 to 1978. From 1988 until her death she was Honorary University Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech.
Philip Stuart Kitcher is a British philosophy professor teaching at Columbia University who specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of literature, and more recently pragmatism.
Nathaniel Charles Comfort is an American historian specializing in the history of biology. He is an associate professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In 2015, he was appointed the third Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center. He also serves on the advisory council of METI.
Ernest Everett Just was a pioneering African-American biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.
The history of molecular evolution starts in the early 20th century with "comparative biochemistry", but the field of molecular evolution came into its own in the 1960s and 1970s, following the rise of molecular biology. The advent of protein sequencing allowed molecular biologists to create phylogenies based on sequence comparison, and to use the differences between homologous sequences as a molecular clock to estimate the time since the last common ancestor. In the late 1960s, the neutral theory of molecular evolution provided a theoretical basis for the molecular clock, though both the clock and the neutral theory were controversial, since most evolutionary biologists held strongly to panselectionism, with natural selection as the only important cause of evolutionary change. After the 1970s, nucleic acid sequencing allowed molecular evolution to reach beyond proteins to highly conserved ribosomal RNA sequences, the foundation of a reconceptualization of the early history of life.
Gunther S. Stent was Graduate Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the early bacteriophage biologists, he was known also for his studies on the metabolism of bacteria and neurobiology of leeches, and for his writing on the history and philosophy of biology.
Mohamed Noor is the Dean of Natural Sciences and a Professor in the Biology Department at Duke University. His specialties include evolution, genetics and genomics.
Oren Harman is a writer and historian of science. His book, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, explores the evolutionary origins of altruism and the tortured polymath, George Price, who wrote an equation to help solve its apparent paradox. The book won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the category of Science and Technology, was long-listed for the Royal Society Winton Prize, was a New York Times Book of the Year, and has inspired theater plays and radio shows. Harman's first book was The Man Who Invented the Chromosome about the English scientist Cyril Dean Darlington, who tried to use biology to understand human culture and history, and whose ideas foreshowed much of the influential field of evolvability. His latest book is Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World detailing in myth-like prose the great events in the history of our universe, from the Big Bang to the evolution of human consciousness. Harman is also the co-creator and editor of a trilogy of books that offer new prisms for understanding the growth and development of the life sciences: Rebels, Outsiders, and Dreamers. He is co-editor of the Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Harman's books have been translated into many languages including Polish, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Turkish, and Malayalam.
Jane Maienschein is an American professor and director of the Center for Biology and Society, at Arizona State University.
Robert J. Richards is an author and the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. He has written or edited seven books about the history of science as well as dozens of articles.
Roberta L. Millstein is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, with affiliations in the Science and Technology Studies Program and the John Muir Institute for the Environment. She is the Senior Co-Chair of the Philosophy of Science Association’s Women's Caucus and an Editor of the peer-reviewed online open-access journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology. She also serves as a member of the Executive Committee and Council for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division (AAAS-PD) as well as the Council for the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB).
C. Kenneth Waters is Canada Research Chair in Logic and the Philosophy of Science and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Recently Waters has been named AAAS Fellow and holds the title of president of the Philosophy of Science Association.
Ute Deichmann is an historian of modern life sciences. She is adjunct full professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where she was the founding director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences in 2007 and continues to be the director. She has also been an associate professor at the University of Cologne, Germany since 2011.
Rachel Ankeny is a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Adelaide. In 2020, she was elected as a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) "for her contributions to our understanding of the foundational roles that organisms play in biological research and her leadership in history and philosophy of science." She is currently the president-elect of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB).
The International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) is an international academic organization founded in 1989. It is the largest and most important meeting for the fields of philosophy of biology, history of biology, and the social studies/science studies/sociological studies of biology. The society hosts a biennial meeting, supports off-year workshops, runs a monthly newsletter, and offers various types of academic prizes.
