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A History of Biology
A comprehensive history of the biological sciences from antiquity to the modern eraThis book presents a global history of the biological sciences from ancient times to today, providing needed perspective on the development of biological thought while shedding light on the field's upheavals and key breakthroughs through the ages. Michel Morange brings to life the dynamic interplay of science, society, and biology’s many subdisciplines, enabling readers to better appreciate the interdisciplinary exchanges that have shaped the field over the centuries.Each chapter of this incisive book focuses on a specific period in the history of biology, describing the major transformations that occurred, the enduring scientific concerns behind these changes, and the implications of yesterday's science for today's. Morange covers everything from the first cell theory to the origins of the concept of ecosystems, and offers perspectives on areas that are often neglected by historians of biology, such as ecology, ethology, and plant biology. Along the way, he highlights the contributions of technology, the important role of hypothesis and experimentation, and the cultural contexts in which some of the most breathtaking discoveries in biology were made.Unrivaled in scope and written by a world-renowned historian of science, A History of Biology is an ideal introduction for students and experts alike, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the present state of biological knowledge.
438 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 18, 2023
A bit dry, textbook-like, with occasional interesting observations. It began to become hard for me from 20th century on - I don't know anything beyond high school biology and was constantly googling and looking up encyclopedia and dictionaries to figure out what he was describing. Informative and with occasional philosophical reflections. Nice book for an overview of the historical terrain..
December 31, 2024
4.5 stars
I read this because I was increasingly engaging in the analytic of metabolism for my thesis, but felt very out of my depth when engaging in the history of biology and biochemistry, which I first noticed when doing RA work on animalcules and the history of microbiology.
This was very interesting and excellently written, and it discussed a lot, but most importantly for me, it opened a lot regarding many iterations of biology which functioned as mechanistic explanations that perceived the bodies of organisms as types of machines (an argument that is central to my own dissertation research on watermills and other mill machinery driven by animals and exploited and/or enslaved human bodies. This book also convinced me that i need to read “Machine and Organism” by Georges Canguilhem. I’ve collected the many excerpts in this book that discuss this machine-animal discourse:
“A mechanistic explanation is an explanation by analogy. That is, the biological phenomenon taking place in the organism is compared to a machine and the explanation hinges on there being mechanisms analogous to those present in machines within the organism. In explanations relating to the action of ferments, it is proposed that phenomena take place that are analogous to those used by humans to transform foods: making bread, alcoholic beverages (wine, beer), cheese, and so on. In a process that is poorly defined, fermentation brings together heat, changes in form and appearance, and small amounts of matter to produce some effect—features that are useful when trying to explain incomprehensible phenomena.
Mechanistic explanations can be found in the writings of Aristotle and Galen. For these authors, such explanations do not account for all physiological phenomena, but they played a role in movement for Aristotle and digestion in the case of Galen, for example. Explanations involving action by ferments come into play in descriptions of embryonic development, but also in explaining the functioning of certain organs, such as the liver or the heart. Both of these types of explanations would have a bright future. Mechanistic explanations would feature prominently in the seventeenth century, without forgetting the action of ferments. The action of enzymes, the successors to ferments, would play a central role in explaining biochemical processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Explanations based around the action of ferments would progressively shift toward molecular ones. Macromolecular mechanisms are now ubiquitous in our explanations of biological processes. The phenomenon of self-organization shares certain characteristics with the action of ferments, including its nearly limitless ability to explain things.
p. 36: “Vesalius preferred dissecting the body himself and criticized his colleagues for contenting themselves with just reading the texts of the ancients. These dissections drew cries of wonder from the audience, who marveled at the beauty of the human machine, revealing the Creator’s admirable work.”
p. 59-60: “At the same time as Borelli, Claude Perrault (1613–1688) was independently carrying out analogous work at the French
Academy of Sciences in Paris, which he described in the third part of his four-volume Essais de physique (Essays on physics), titled Mécanique des animaux (Animal mechanics), published in 1680. Perrault is better known for his architectural work (he was involved in the restoration of the Louvre) and for his support of the Modernist school in architecture. The analogies that he used to explain the genesis of movement in animals were borrowed directly from machines of the period. When it came to philosophy, he opposed Descartes’s ideas and warmed to those of Pierre Gassendi, and he used the argument that animals have souls to explain their movement, while drawing on an atomistic view of matter.
Italian physician Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1707) would call this new approach to living phenomena “iatrophysics.” In this approach, the organism is compared to a machine made up of levers and springs, whose operation can be explained in physical terms, as opposed to chemical explanations, involving ferments, which Baglivi renamed “iatrochemistry.”
It is difficult to position the work of Descartes (1596–1650) in the context of the work being carried out during the period. Galileo’s influence in the development of biophysics and quantitative biology was as strong as that of Descartes, and the latter’s concept of the “animal-machine” was far from being unanimously accepted among naturalists. Indeed, as we have seen, it was rejected by Perrault, who gave animals souls while still maintaining a mechanistic approach to the living world. Descartes carried out numerous dissections while living in Amsterdam, from 1630 to 1631. He set out his ideas on human physiology in Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), L’Homme (Treatise of Man),7 and Premières pensées sur la génération des animaux (First thoughts concerning the generation of animals). Unfortunately, his physiological work, like his work in physics, contains many errors.
p. 67-68: “Perrault, Descartes, and Baglivi were constantly comparing living organisms to machines. A mechanistic view of the living world does not, however, necessarily mean comparing them in this way—it can
simply involve stating that organisms are subject to the same physical principles in their functioning as are machines. These new explanations of living phenomena can be called mechanistic only by extension, because they draw on physical explanations and physics is considered to be mechanistic.
p. 70: “Descartes’s fabricated ideas would therefore no longer hold sway. Many scholars have noted what appears to be an internal contradiction in Descartes’s work: the unique quality of a machine is that it is put together by the person who builds it, who is external to it. It is not plausible to compare an organism to a machine, while at the same time having this organism be capable of building itself. Preformation theory allows us to keep this analogy between organisms and machines, without having to deal with the thorny issue of how they were formed.”
p. 72: “The Machines in Front of Us
When they compared the human body or certain body parts to machines, scholars from the seventeenth century looked to the machines that they had in front of them as points of reference. Descartes used the analogy of the organ (the musical instrument), a machine that was commonplace.
This seems to be a general rule in science. At the beginning to twentieth century, Charles Sherrington compared the organization of nerve connections to telephone line connections. The models used in science are borrowed from one’s immediate surroundings and from current affairs—a rule that applies as much in our time as any other. Machines no longer feature in the news today, but rather computers and, even more so, communication networks. Is it purely a coincidence that networks feature so heavily in the work of cellular and molecular biologists today?”
p. 86-87: “The eighteenth century also saw its share of metaphysical conjecture. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) did not conduct any experiments, nor was there anything original in his ideas. Indeed, his mythical account of the formation of organisms was copied from Lucretius’s De rerum natura. After a sojourn in Holland, he published L’homme machine (Machine man), an extension of Descartes’s mechanistic view of the living world to human beings, in which he denied the existence of a rational and immortal soul. He thought that monkeys, if trained, could stand up on their hind legs and begin speaking, which Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–1789) showed to be impossible, given the animals’ anatomy. Though his pamphlet gained some renown, his role in the development of biological thought is questionable.”
p. 284: “Molecular biology couldn’t have emerged without the development of a new branch of chemistry that assigned major importance to weak bonds. Notions such as conformation (and transconformation) were born out of that new chemistry. It enabled at least the partial reconciliation of the physical and chemical conceptions of life that had clashed with each other since antiquity. The success of the expression “molecular machines” to describe proteins or groups of proteins is proof of this.”
p. 332: “It also proved to be well adapted for the assimilation of proteins into nanomachines, because it made it easy to see the relative movements of the different parts of proteins during their functioning. Despite the importance of this representation, Jane Richardson’s name and her contribution are little known—yet another example of an accomplishment essential to the development of the sciences that escapes the usual channels of recognition.
The structures of increasingly large protein assemblages— viruses, ribosomes—have been elucidated using a combination of X-ray diffraction and very high-resolution electron microscopy. The structures of a class of proteins that had hitherto remained resistant to crystallization, membrane proteins, were gradually revealed from the mid-1980s. Membrane proteins (and their assemblages) play essential roles in cells: they capture light energy in photosynthetic organisms; produce cell energy in the form of ATP; are receptors for hormones, growth factors and neurotransmitters; and act as channels enabling the selective passage of ions—a particularly important function in nerve cells.”
p. 349: “Little by little, the evolutionary history of proteins is unfolding. The comparison of the sequences and structures of homologous proteins from different species has enabled the reconstruction of the ancestral form of those proteins, and the steps that have led to the current forms. Combined with in vitro evolutionary experiments, such as those begun more than 30 years ago by Richard Lenski (1956–) on bacteria, these experiments have contributed to making these nanomolecular machines of life not only superb objects of study for physicists, but also the products of an evolutionary history gradually unveiled.”
p. 376: “Setting out to write a complete history of biology, one that includes every branch, is more than just an arduous task. For such a history can reveal the complex dynamics of the development of biological knowledge.
These dynamics include rapid innovations, as can be seen in the way biologists have repeatedly borrowed imagery from the machines that surrounded them. Harvey compared the heart to a pump, Descartes the bodies of animals to a church organ, Sherrington compared nerves to telegraph wires, and George Beadle likened metabolic pathways to assembly lines in factories.1 More recently, the information contained in genes has been compared to the data stored in a computer, and metabolic pathways and networks, as well as those of cell signaling, to the internet and social networks.”
p. 377-378: “Galileo and Descartes, but also the physiologists of the nineteenth century, “developmental mechanics” at the end of the same century, and geneticists and molecular biologists in the twentieth century—all borrowed methods from physics in order to further biological knowledge. Similarly, the mechanistic model of life, the comparison of an organism to a machine, persisted from Aristotle and Galen to molecular biology, via the mechanists of the seventeenth century. Explaining the characteristics of organisms through the existence of internal structures with distinct functions is also linked to the mechanistic concept of life, and appears throughout the history of biology, from antiquity to current research on functions of macromolecules.
These mechanistic ways of thinking about biological questions and of seeking answers to them can make the acceptance of new theories, such as cell theory, more challenging. The fact that cells are the basic element in the organization of living things is difficult to reconcile with the view favored by physiologists in the nineteenth century of the organism as a collection of distinct functional parts.
Some cumulative approaches have also had a long life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the objective of many organic chemists was to gradually describe all the chemical components of life; they were convinced that such a description would in itself provide an explanation of the phenomena unique to living organisms. Crystallographers in the twentieth century, such as Rosalind Franklin and Max Perutz, pursued the same project.
Such continuities and recurrences have sometimes appeared in pairs, as Gerald Holton has demonstrated in physics.2 In biology, mechanistic explanations have always been contrasted with explanations by the activity of fermentation. Such explanations were used by Aristotle to account for embryonic development; they were used (and abused) by alchemists; the enzymatic theory of life flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. We believe that modern explanations that call on self-organization and epigenetic modification have a great deal in common with these earlier explanations.”
There is also an excellent section in Chapter 8 on biochemistry containing a really interesting section on metabolic pathways, and the subsequent shift to metabolic networks (that really does open possibilities for engaging with Latour which some Marxists detest or are embarrassed by, but I think is actually an extremely generative mode of thinking through the history of technoscience and the environment:
“One is hard-pressed not to make a connection with the growing role networks have assumed in the descriptions and explanations of contemporary biology. We no longer speak of pathways, but of metabolic networks. Signaling networks enable cells to respond to signals coming from their environment, and embryonic development is controlled by networks of developmental genes. The use of the term “network” is now common in evolutionary biology and ecology.”
The communist scientists Bernal and Needham are both mentioned, but Haldane is the most extensively discussed communist scientist in the book I think. There was an entire subsection in this book called “The Influence of Marxism”:
“Three realms deserve particular attention: population genetics, with the important role played by Haldane and the “Cambridge Marxists”; Soviet ecology with Vernadsky; and the question of the origin of life with Oparin and, again, Haldane. Were these three scientific developments the result, in one way or another, of the attachment of their “birth fathers” to Marxism?”
A great read.
I read this because I was increasingly engaging in the analytic of metabolism for my thesis, but felt very out of my depth when engaging in the history of biology and biochemistry, which I first noticed when doing RA work on animalcules and the history of microbiology.
This was very interesting and excellently written, and it discussed a lot, but most importantly for me, it opened a lot regarding many iterations of biology which functioned as mechanistic explanations that perceived the bodies of organisms as types of machines (an argument that is central to my own dissertation research on watermills and other mill machinery driven by animals and exploited and/or enslaved human bodies. This book also convinced me that i need to read “Machine and Organism” by Georges Canguilhem. I’ve collected the many excerpts in this book that discuss this machine-animal discourse:
“A mechanistic explanation is an explanation by analogy. That is, the biological phenomenon taking place in the organism is compared to a machine and the explanation hinges on there being mechanisms analogous to those present in machines within the organism. In explanations relating to the action of ferments, it is proposed that phenomena take place that are analogous to those used by humans to transform foods: making bread, alcoholic beverages (wine, beer), cheese, and so on. In a process that is poorly defined, fermentation brings together heat, changes in form and appearance, and small amounts of matter to produce some effect—features that are useful when trying to explain incomprehensible phenomena.
Mechanistic explanations can be found in the writings of Aristotle and Galen. For these authors, such explanations do not account for all physiological phenomena, but they played a role in movement for Aristotle and digestion in the case of Galen, for example. Explanations involving action by ferments come into play in descriptions of embryonic development, but also in explaining the functioning of certain organs, such as the liver or the heart. Both of these types of explanations would have a bright future. Mechanistic explanations would feature prominently in the seventeenth century, without forgetting the action of ferments. The action of enzymes, the successors to ferments, would play a central role in explaining biochemical processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Explanations based around the action of ferments would progressively shift toward molecular ones. Macromolecular mechanisms are now ubiquitous in our explanations of biological processes. The phenomenon of self-organization shares certain characteristics with the action of ferments, including its nearly limitless ability to explain things.
p. 36: “Vesalius preferred dissecting the body himself and criticized his colleagues for contenting themselves with just reading the texts of the ancients. These dissections drew cries of wonder from the audience, who marveled at the beauty of the human machine, revealing the Creator’s admirable work.”
p. 59-60: “At the same time as Borelli, Claude Perrault (1613–1688) was independently carrying out analogous work at the French
Academy of Sciences in Paris, which he described in the third part of his four-volume Essais de physique (Essays on physics), titled Mécanique des animaux (Animal mechanics), published in 1680. Perrault is better known for his architectural work (he was involved in the restoration of the Louvre) and for his support of the Modernist school in architecture. The analogies that he used to explain the genesis of movement in animals were borrowed directly from machines of the period. When it came to philosophy, he opposed Descartes’s ideas and warmed to those of Pierre Gassendi, and he used the argument that animals have souls to explain their movement, while drawing on an atomistic view of matter.
Italian physician Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1707) would call this new approach to living phenomena “iatrophysics.” In this approach, the organism is compared to a machine made up of levers and springs, whose operation can be explained in physical terms, as opposed to chemical explanations, involving ferments, which Baglivi renamed “iatrochemistry.”
It is difficult to position the work of Descartes (1596–1650) in the context of the work being carried out during the period. Galileo’s influence in the development of biophysics and quantitative biology was as strong as that of Descartes, and the latter’s concept of the “animal-machine” was far from being unanimously accepted among naturalists. Indeed, as we have seen, it was rejected by Perrault, who gave animals souls while still maintaining a mechanistic approach to the living world. Descartes carried out numerous dissections while living in Amsterdam, from 1630 to 1631. He set out his ideas on human physiology in Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), L’Homme (Treatise of Man),7 and Premières pensées sur la génération des animaux (First thoughts concerning the generation of animals). Unfortunately, his physiological work, like his work in physics, contains many errors.
p. 67-68: “Perrault, Descartes, and Baglivi were constantly comparing living organisms to machines. A mechanistic view of the living world does not, however, necessarily mean comparing them in this way—it can
simply involve stating that organisms are subject to the same physical principles in their functioning as are machines. These new explanations of living phenomena can be called mechanistic only by extension, because they draw on physical explanations and physics is considered to be mechanistic.
p. 70: “Descartes’s fabricated ideas would therefore no longer hold sway. Many scholars have noted what appears to be an internal contradiction in Descartes’s work: the unique quality of a machine is that it is put together by the person who builds it, who is external to it. It is not plausible to compare an organism to a machine, while at the same time having this organism be capable of building itself. Preformation theory allows us to keep this analogy between organisms and machines, without having to deal with the thorny issue of how they were formed.”
p. 72: “The Machines in Front of Us
When they compared the human body or certain body parts to machines, scholars from the seventeenth century looked to the machines that they had in front of them as points of reference. Descartes used the analogy of the organ (the musical instrument), a machine that was commonplace.
This seems to be a general rule in science. At the beginning to twentieth century, Charles Sherrington compared the organization of nerve connections to telephone line connections. The models used in science are borrowed from one’s immediate surroundings and from current affairs—a rule that applies as much in our time as any other. Machines no longer feature in the news today, but rather computers and, even more so, communication networks. Is it purely a coincidence that networks feature so heavily in the work of cellular and molecular biologists today?”
p. 86-87: “The eighteenth century also saw its share of metaphysical conjecture. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) did not conduct any experiments, nor was there anything original in his ideas. Indeed, his mythical account of the formation of organisms was copied from Lucretius’s De rerum natura. After a sojourn in Holland, he published L’homme machine (Machine man), an extension of Descartes’s mechanistic view of the living world to human beings, in which he denied the existence of a rational and immortal soul. He thought that monkeys, if trained, could stand up on their hind legs and begin speaking, which Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–1789) showed to be impossible, given the animals’ anatomy. Though his pamphlet gained some renown, his role in the development of biological thought is questionable.”
p. 284: “Molecular biology couldn’t have emerged without the development of a new branch of chemistry that assigned major importance to weak bonds. Notions such as conformation (and transconformation) were born out of that new chemistry. It enabled at least the partial reconciliation of the physical and chemical conceptions of life that had clashed with each other since antiquity. The success of the expression “molecular machines” to describe proteins or groups of proteins is proof of this.”
p. 332: “It also proved to be well adapted for the assimilation of proteins into nanomachines, because it made it easy to see the relative movements of the different parts of proteins during their functioning. Despite the importance of this representation, Jane Richardson’s name and her contribution are little known—yet another example of an accomplishment essential to the development of the sciences that escapes the usual channels of recognition.
The structures of increasingly large protein assemblages— viruses, ribosomes—have been elucidated using a combination of X-ray diffraction and very high-resolution electron microscopy. The structures of a class of proteins that had hitherto remained resistant to crystallization, membrane proteins, were gradually revealed from the mid-1980s. Membrane proteins (and their assemblages) play essential roles in cells: they capture light energy in photosynthetic organisms; produce cell energy in the form of ATP; are receptors for hormones, growth factors and neurotransmitters; and act as channels enabling the selective passage of ions—a particularly important function in nerve cells.”
p. 349: “Little by little, the evolutionary history of proteins is unfolding. The comparison of the sequences and structures of homologous proteins from different species has enabled the reconstruction of the ancestral form of those proteins, and the steps that have led to the current forms. Combined with in vitro evolutionary experiments, such as those begun more than 30 years ago by Richard Lenski (1956–) on bacteria, these experiments have contributed to making these nanomolecular machines of life not only superb objects of study for physicists, but also the products of an evolutionary history gradually unveiled.”
p. 376: “Setting out to write a complete history of biology, one that includes every branch, is more than just an arduous task. For such a history can reveal the complex dynamics of the development of biological knowledge.
These dynamics include rapid innovations, as can be seen in the way biologists have repeatedly borrowed imagery from the machines that surrounded them. Harvey compared the heart to a pump, Descartes the bodies of animals to a church organ, Sherrington compared nerves to telegraph wires, and George Beadle likened metabolic pathways to assembly lines in factories.1 More recently, the information contained in genes has been compared to the data stored in a computer, and metabolic pathways and networks, as well as those of cell signaling, to the internet and social networks.”
p. 377-378: “Galileo and Descartes, but also the physiologists of the nineteenth century, “developmental mechanics” at the end of the same century, and geneticists and molecular biologists in the twentieth century—all borrowed methods from physics in order to further biological knowledge. Similarly, the mechanistic model of life, the comparison of an organism to a machine, persisted from Aristotle and Galen to molecular biology, via the mechanists of the seventeenth century. Explaining the characteristics of organisms through the existence of internal structures with distinct functions is also linked to the mechanistic concept of life, and appears throughout the history of biology, from antiquity to current research on functions of macromolecules.
These mechanistic ways of thinking about biological questions and of seeking answers to them can make the acceptance of new theories, such as cell theory, more challenging. The fact that cells are the basic element in the organization of living things is difficult to reconcile with the view favored by physiologists in the nineteenth century of the organism as a collection of distinct functional parts.
Some cumulative approaches have also had a long life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the objective of many organic chemists was to gradually describe all the chemical components of life; they were convinced that such a description would in itself provide an explanation of the phenomena unique to living organisms. Crystallographers in the twentieth century, such as Rosalind Franklin and Max Perutz, pursued the same project.
Such continuities and recurrences have sometimes appeared in pairs, as Gerald Holton has demonstrated in physics.2 In biology, mechanistic explanations have always been contrasted with explanations by the activity of fermentation. Such explanations were used by Aristotle to account for embryonic development; they were used (and abused) by alchemists; the enzymatic theory of life flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. We believe that modern explanations that call on self-organization and epigenetic modification have a great deal in common with these earlier explanations.”
There is also an excellent section in Chapter 8 on biochemistry containing a really interesting section on metabolic pathways, and the subsequent shift to metabolic networks (that really does open possibilities for engaging with Latour which some Marxists detest or are embarrassed by, but I think is actually an extremely generative mode of thinking through the history of technoscience and the environment:
“One is hard-pressed not to make a connection with the growing role networks have assumed in the descriptions and explanations of contemporary biology. We no longer speak of pathways, but of metabolic networks. Signaling networks enable cells to respond to signals coming from their environment, and embryonic development is controlled by networks of developmental genes. The use of the term “network” is now common in evolutionary biology and ecology.”
The communist scientists Bernal and Needham are both mentioned, but Haldane is the most extensively discussed communist scientist in the book I think. There was an entire subsection in this book called “The Influence of Marxism”:
“Three realms deserve particular attention: population genetics, with the important role played by Haldane and the “Cambridge Marxists”; Soviet ecology with Vernadsky; and the question of the origin of life with Oparin and, again, Haldane. Were these three scientific developments the result, in one way or another, of the attachment of their “birth fathers” to Marxism?”
A great read.
November 8, 2021
This is an extremely comprehensive look at the history of biology, from its beginnings alongside philosophy to the modern worlds of neuroscience and genomic sequencing. It is, by its own admission, a tale of western biology. There are elements of middle eastern and eastern science, but only where they influence the thinking of western scientists in the moment.
The beginning of the book is a little bit of a slog, a march of names and dates and bouncing theories. The book really shines once we make our way to the 19th century. This is probably a product of the available information, much of the scientific history before then is lost to time. Once the 19th century shows up, the scientists become people, the ideas, arguments, and innovations that spur progress.
This is a must have for the students of history and biology, a concise reference of those who came before.
The beginning of the book is a little bit of a slog, a march of names and dates and bouncing theories. The book really shines once we make our way to the 19th century. This is probably a product of the available information, much of the scientific history before then is lost to time. Once the 19th century shows up, the scientists become people, the ideas, arguments, and innovations that spur progress.
This is a must have for the students of history and biology, a concise reference of those who came before.
January 9, 2025
I ended up actually enjoying this book on the whole. At first, and at a few points throughout, I thought the book was not my cup of tea because it was vague and the descriptions felt a little too short. But then when the book was over, I did still feel it dragged a bit, but it covered so many topics over such a large time period that it was unlike any other book I have found about biology. While there are tons about physics not many about biology so I applaud the effort and it does provide a multitude of jumping off points for further research. I also appreciated his compilation efforts of how he categorized and grouped the different scientific breakthroughs in the field of biology.
April 26, 2022
A fine review of the history of biology for a lay audience.
September 1, 2023
a little bit dry for a vacation reading, but a good and comprehensive review of the history of biology!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews