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Full-Text Articles in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biology: What One Needs To Know, Ursula Goodenough
Biology: What One Needs To Know, Ursula Goodenough
Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations
Biology on this planet represents an astonishing experiment in carbon-based chemistry which, over billions of years, has generated billions of species adapted to countless major and minor fluctuations in ecological circumstances. In one sense there is no way to generalize about biology. While biological activities can all be ultimately explained by physical laws (like everything else in the universe), it is the emergent intensely particular properties of organisms that most interest us. This essay represents an attempt to describe some of the more prominent patterns that emerge from the sea of biological particularities, patterns that present many opportunities for religious …
Trees Of History In Systematics And Philology, Robert O’Hara
Trees Of History In Systematics And Philology, Robert O’Hara
Robert J. O’Hara
«The Natural System» is the name given to the underlying arrangement present in the diversity of life. Unlike a classification, which is made up of classes and members, a system or arrangement is an integrated whole made up of connected parts. In the pre-evolutionary period a variety of forms were proposed for the Natural System, including maps, circles, stars, and abstract multidimensional objects. The trees sketched by Darwin in the 1830s should probably be considered the first genuine evolutionary diagrams of the Natural System—the first genuine evolutionary trees. Darwin refined his image of the Natural System in the well-known evolutionary …