That's biology

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This is Biology - The Science of Life , in the original: This is Biology: The Science of the Living World is a work by the German-American evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr , published in the USA in 1997 and in a German translation by Jorunn Wißmann in 2000 .

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Mayr writes in the autobiographical foreword that not only the public but also many biologists have “an outdated idea of biological science ”. They rarely have time to break away from their respective specialty disciplines and look at biology as a whole. Many biologists are hardly aware of what areas such as genetics , embryology , taxonomy or ecology have in common “and to what extent they differ fundamentally from physics . One of the main aims of this book is to create clarity here. "

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In the book, Mayr tries to answer the following 12 questions that make up the chapters:

  • What does "life" mean?
  • What is science
  • How does science explain nature?
  • How does biology explain the living world?
  • Is science making progress?
  • How are the biological sciences structured?
  • Asking what: exploring biodiversity
  • Questions about the how: the becoming of an individual
  • Asking why: the evolution of organisms
  • What questions does ecology ask ?
  • What is the place of humans in evolution?
  • Can ethics be explained in evolutionary terms?

He includes philosophical questions and aspects of the history of science .

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