Life & Health Sciences
Living systems at every scale — molecule, cell, organism, biosphere — unified by one idea: descent with modification.
17 fields · 189 topics · 205 curated works
The smallest unit that counts as alive — membranes, organelles, the cytoskeleton, and the division cycle that copies all of it.
Foundations & Overviews · Cell Structure & Organelles · Cell Membranes & Transport · The Cytoskeleton · Cell Cycle & Division
How information is stored, copied and expressed.
Foundations & Overviews · DNA Structure & Replication · Transcription · Translation · The Genetic Code
Biology at the scale where you need a computer to read the data.
Foundations & Overviews · Genome Sequencing · Comparative Genomics · Transcriptomics · Proteomics
The organising principle of the entire domain.
Foundations & Overviews · Natural Selection · Genetic Drift · Speciation · Adaptation
Organisms in relation to each other and to their environment.
Foundations & Overviews · Population Ecology · Community Ecology · Ecosystem Ecology · Trophic Dynamics & Food Webs
How bodies work as integrated systems — the cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and endocrine machinery that holds a state steady.
Foundations & Overviews · Homeostasis · Cardiovascular Physiology · Respiratory Physiology · Renal Physiology
The organisms that outnumber and outweigh everything else.
Foundations & Overviews · Bacteriology · Virology · Mycology · Parasitology
The body's distributed defence system, and its failure modes.
Foundations & Overviews · Innate Immunity · Adaptive Immunity · Antibodies & B Cells · T Cell Biology
From a single cell to a body plan — differentiation, pattern formation and the genes that tell a limb where to grow.
Foundations & Overviews · Embryogenesis · Morphogenesis · Cell Differentiation · Pattern Formation
Plants — the base of nearly every food chain.
Foundations & Overviews · Plant Anatomy · Photosynthesis · Plant Physiology · Plant Reproduction
Animals and why they do what they do — from invertebrate diversity to ethology, where behaviour is treated as an evolved trait.
Foundations & Overviews · Invertebrate Zoology · Vertebrate Zoology · Entomology · Ornithology
Life in the largest habitat on Earth — reefs, the deep sea, plankton production, and the fisheries science that governs its use.
Foundations & Overviews · Coral Reef Ecology · Deep Sea Biology · Marine Mammals · Fish Biology
The history of life, reconstructed from an incomplete record.
Foundations & Overviews · Fossilisation & Taphonomy · Precambrian Life · The Cambrian Explosion · Dinosaurs
Modelling life as a network, then engineering it.
Foundations & Overviews · Metabolic Networks · Gene Regulatory Networks · Network Motifs · Mathematical Models of Cells
Biology deployed for industrial and medical ends.
Foundations & Overviews · Fermentation Technology · Protein Engineering · Monoclonal Antibodies · Gene Therapy
Applied ecology under time pressure: fragmentation, small-population genetics, and the hard trade-offs of protecting anything.
Foundations & Overviews · Habitat Fragmentation · Endangered Species Management · Protected Areas · Rewilding
Arguments about what life is and how it should be studied.
Foundations & Overviews · Pre-Darwinian Natural History · Darwin & the Origin of Species · The Modern Synthesis · Discovery of the Double Helix
No prior grounding assumed.
Experiments in Plant-Hybridisation
Gregor Mendel · 1866
Pea-plant crosses show inherited traits are governed by discrete paired factors that segregate independently, not a continuous blend of parental…
+16 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin · 1859
Descent with modification through natural selection accounts for the diversity and design of living things without a designer.
+53 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Species Plantarum
Carl Linnaeus · 1753
Assigns every known plant species a standard two-part Latin name, replacing long descriptive phrases with a stable naming system still used as…
+133 more at this level
12 of 205 works
Gregor Mendel
Pea-plant crosses show inherited traits are governed by discrete paired factors that segregate independently, not a continuous blend of parental characters.
44 pageslink failing as of 17 Sept 2026Charles Darwin
Shows through hundreds of feeding experiments on sundews and Venus flytraps that some plants digest captured insects with a process functionally like animal digestion, and argues carnivory evolved because it lets a plant supplement poor soil nitrogen.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Darwin (ed.)
Darwin's son assembles his father's autobiography, correspondence and notebooks into the first authoritative account of how the theory of evolution by natural selection actually took shape.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean-Henri Fabre
Close, patient observation of beetles and other insects in their own habitat argues that instinct, not reason, drives even the most apparently intelligent insect behaviour.
about 6.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Martin F. Glaessner
Argues the soft-bodied Ediacaran impressions found across several continents are genuine multicellular animals and not inorganic or algal structures, establishing them as the oldest known animal fossils.
Scott F. Gilbert
The standard textbook treatment of how a single fertilised egg becomes a complex organism, integrating genetics, cell biology and evolution into one developmental framework.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bryce Kendrick
A comprehensive, engagingly written introduction to fungi -- their biology, diversity, ecology, and the roles both benign and pathogenic they play in the world.
E. O. Wilson & Frances M. Peter
Proceedings of the National Forum on BioDiversity arguing that species loss is accelerating past any prior era, and coining 'biodiversity' as the term for what is at stake.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Union for Conservation of Nature
Sets out the quantitative thresholds -- population decline, range size, number of mature individuals -- that sort a species into a Red List category from Least Concern to Extinct.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hiroaki Kitano
Argues that biology's next advances will come from treating cells and organisms as systems defined by structure and dynamics, not from cataloguing genes and proteins alone.
Preston Foerder et al.
An Asian elephant stacks and stands on a block to reach suspended food, taken as evidence that insight problem-solving is not limited to primates and corvids.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David A. Baum & Stacey D. Smith
Teaches phylogenetic trees as the basic vocabulary of comparative biology, and shows how routinely they are misread by people trained to read a ladder instead of a branching diagram.