History of zoology through 1859
The history of zoology before
During the European
Over the 18th and 19th centuries, zoology became increasingly professional
Pre-scientific zoology
The
Ancient eastern cultures
The ancient cultures of
Ancient Greek traditions
The
Aristotelian zoology
Aristotle
The philosopher Aristotle created the science of biology, basing its theory on both his metaphysical principles and on observation. He proposed theories for the processes of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, embryonic development and inheritance. He made detailed observations of nature, especially the habits and attributes of animals in the sea at Lesbos. He classified 540 animal species, and dissected at least 50.[7][8][9]
Aristotle, and nearly all Western scholars after him until the 18th century, believed that creatures were arranged in a graded scale of perfection rising from plants on up to humans: the scala naturae or
Hellenistic zoology
A few scholars in the Hellenistic period under the Ptolemies—particularly Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Chios—amended Aristotle's physiological work, even performing experimental dissections and vivisections.[11] Claudius Galen became the most important authority on medicine and anatomy. Though a few ancient atomists such as Lucretius challenged the teleological Aristotelian viewpoint that all aspects of life are the result of design or purpose, teleology (and after the rise of Christianity, natural theology) remained central to biological thought until the 18th and 19th centuries.[12]
Medieval and Islamic zoology
The decline of the
Medieval
During the High Middle Ages, a few European scholars such as Hildegard of Bingen, Albertus Magnus and Frederick II expanded the natural history canon. Magnus's De animalibus libri XXVI was one of the most extensive studies of zoological observation published before modern times.[19][20]
Renaissance and early modern
From anatomy to systematic taxonomy
The
In the 17th century, the enthusiasts of the new sciences, the investigators of nature by means of observation and experiment, banded themselves into academies or societies for mutual support and discourse. The first founded of surviving European academies, the
Before the
Extending the work of Vesalius into experiments on still living bodies (of both humans and animals),
Impact of the microscope
In the early 17th century, the micro-world of zoology was just beginning to open up. A few lensmakers and natural philosophers had been creating crude
Debate over the
Advances in microscopy also had a profound impact on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed to the central importance of the cell. In 1838 and 1839, Schleiden and Schwann began promoting the ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells have all the characteristics of life, though they opposed the idea that (3) all cells come from the division of other cells. Thanks to the work of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, however, by the 1860s most biologists accepted all three tenets of what came to be known as cell theory.[30]
In advance of On the Origin of Species
Up through the 19th century, the scope of zoology was largely divided between physiology, which investigated questions of form and function, and natural history, which was concerned with the diversity of life and interactions among different forms of life and between life and non-life. By 1900, much of these domains overlapped, while natural history (and its counterpart natural philosophy) had largely given way to more specialized scientific disciplines—cytology, bacteriology, morphology, embryology, geography, and geology. Widespread travel by naturalists in the early-to-mid-19th century resulted in a wealth of new information about the diversity and distribution of living organisms. Of particular importance was the work of Alexander von Humboldt, which analyzed the relationship between organisms and their environment (i.e., the domain of natural history) using the quantitative approaches of natural philosophy (i.e., physics and chemistry). Humboldt's work laid the foundations of biogeography and inspired several generations of scientists.[31]
The emerging discipline of geology also brought natural history and natural philosophy closer together;
See also
- History of Zoology
- List of zoologists
- List of Russian zoologists
- Important Publications in Zoology
- Timeline of zoology
References
- ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 2–3
- ISBN 978-0-521-29286-3.
- ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, p. 6
- ^ Girish Dwivedi, Shridhar Dwivedi (2007). "History of Medicine: Sushruta – the Clinician – Teacher par Excellence" (PDF). National Informatics Centre. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-10-10. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
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(help) - ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 3–9
- ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 9–27
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 84–90, 135
- ^ Mason, A History of the Sciences, pp 41–44
- ISBN 978-1-4088-3622-4.
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 201–202; see also: Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being
- ^ Barnes, Hellenistic Philosophy and Science, p 383–384
- ^ Annas, Classical Greek Philosophy, p 252
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 91–94
- ^ Mehmet Bayrakdar, "Al-Jahiz And the Rise of Biological Evolutionism", The Islamic Quarterly, Third Quarter, 1983, London.
- ISBN 978-1-4020-8865-0.
- ^ Conway Zirkle (1941), Natural Selection before the "Origin of Species", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 84 (1): 71–123.
- ^ Frank N. Egerton, "A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 6: Arabic Language Science - Origins and Zoological", Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, April 2002: 142–146 [143]
- ^ Lawrence I. Conrad (1982), "Taun and Waba: Conceptions of Plague and Pestilence in Early Islam", Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25 (3), pp. 268–307 [278].
- ^ Albertus Magnus. On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica. The Review of Metaphysics | December 01, 2001 | Tkacz, Michael W.
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 91–94: "As far as biology as a whole is concerned, it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that the universities became centers of biological research."
- ^ a b public domain: Lankester, Edwin Ray (1911). "Zoology". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 1022–1039. See especially pp. 1022–1024. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 166–171
- ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 80–83
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, chapter 4
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, chapter 7
- ^ See Raby, Bright Paradise
- ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 103–113
- ^ Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 133–144
- ^ Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, pp 41–93
- ^ Sapp, Genesis, chapter 7; Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, chapters 2
- ^ Bowler, The Earth Encompassed, pp 204–211
- ^ Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, pp 112–113
- ^ Bowler, The Earth Encompassed, pp 211–220
- ^ Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, chapter 10: "Darwin's evidence for evolution and common descent"; and chapter 11: "The causation of evolution: natural selection"; Larson, Evolution, chapter 3
- ^ Desmond & Moore 1991, pp. 210, 284–285
- ^ Desmond & Moore 1991, pp. 263–274
- S2CID 202574857.
- S2CID 81107747.
Sources
- Desmond, Adrian J.; Moore, James (1991). Darwin. Warner Books.