Life & Health Sciences

Biology

Living systems at every scale — molecule, cell, organism, population, biosphere — unified by one idea: descent with modification.

17 fields · 172 topics · 19 curated works

Fields within Biology

Cell Biology

The smallest unit that counts as alive.

Cell Structure & Organelles · Cell Membranes & Transport · The Cytoskeleton · Cell Cycle & Division · Mitosis & Meiosis

Molecular Biology & Genetics

How information is stored, copied and expressed.

DNA Structure & Replication · Transcription · Translation · The Genetic Code · Gene Regulation

Genomics & Bioinformatics

Biology at the scale where you need a computer to read the data.

Genome Sequencing · Comparative Genomics · Transcriptomics · Proteomics · Metagenomics

Evolutionary Biology

The organising principle of the entire domain.

Natural Selection · Genetic Drift · Speciation · Adaptation · Sexual Selection

Ecology

Organisms in relation to each other and to their environment.

Population Ecology · Community Ecology · Ecosystem Ecology · Trophic Dynamics & Food Webs · Biodiversity & Species Richness

Physiology

How bodies work as integrated systems.

Homeostasis · Cardiovascular Physiology · Respiratory Physiology · Renal Physiology · Endocrine Physiology

Microbiology

The organisms that outnumber and outweigh everything else.

Bacteriology · Virology · Mycology · Parasitology · Microbial Genetics

Immunology

The body's distributed defence system, and its failure modes.

Innate Immunity · Adaptive Immunity · Antibodies & B Cells · T Cell Biology · Antigen Presentation

Developmental Biology

From a single cell to a body plan.

Embryogenesis · Morphogenesis · Cell Differentiation · Pattern Formation · Hox Genes

Botany & Plant Science

Plants — the base of nearly every food chain.

Plant Anatomy · Photosynthesis · Plant Physiology · Plant Reproduction · Plant Genetics & Breeding

Zoology & Animal Behaviour

Animals, and why they do what they do.

Invertebrate Zoology · Vertebrate Zoology · Entomology · Ornithology · Herpetology

Marine Biology

Life in the largest habitat on Earth.

Coral Reef Ecology · Deep Sea Biology · Marine Mammals · Fish Biology · Plankton & Primary Production

Palaeontology

The history of life, reconstructed from an incomplete record.

Fossilisation & Taphonomy · Precambrian Life · The Cambrian Explosion · Dinosaurs · Mass Extinctions

Systems & Synthetic Biology

Modelling life as a network, then engineering it.

Metabolic Networks · Gene Regulatory Networks · Network Motifs · Mathematical Models of Cells · Synthetic Gene Circuits

Biotechnology

Biology deployed for industrial and medical ends.

Fermentation Technology · Protein Engineering · Monoclonal Antibodies · Gene Therapy · Cell Culture

Conservation Biology

Applied ecology under time pressure.

Habitat Fragmentation · Endangered Species Management · Protected Areas · Rewilding · Captive Breeding

History & Philosophy of Biology

Arguments about what life is and how it should be studied.

Pre-Darwinian Natural History · Darwin & the Origin of Species · The Modern Synthesis · Discovery of the Double Helix · Vitalism & Mechanism

Reading in Biology

Start here

No prior grounding assumed.

A Sand County AlmanacAldo Leopold, 1949
Proposes a land ethic in which soil, water and animals are members of a community rather than resources, and founds modern conservation thinking.
Book
The Selfish GeneRichard Dawkins, 1976
Reframes evolution from the gene's point of view, which explains altruism, conflict and cooperation more cleanly than group selection.
Book
Endless Forms Most BeautifulSean B. Carroll, 2005
Evolution works mostly by changing when and where existing genes switch on, which is why so little new genetic material produces so much new form.
Book
The Sixth ExtinctionElizabeth Kolbert, 2014
Documents an extinction event in progress by visiting it, and shows the cause is not one thing but the sum of everything we do.
Book
Other MindsPeter Godfrey-Smith, 2016
The octopus evolved a nervous system independently of ours, which makes it the closest thing to meeting an intelligence from elsewhere.
Book
The Double HelixJames D. Watson, 1968
An unusually candid account of how a major discovery was actually made, including the competition and the borrowed data.
Book
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of EvolutionTheodosius Dobzhansky, 1973· 5 pages
Without evolution biology is a pile of disconnected facts; with it, the same facts form a single explanatory structure.
Essay
A Crack in CreationJennifer Doudna & Samuel Sternberg, 2017
The co-inventor of CRISPR editing on how it works and why she began arguing for limits on it almost immediately.
Book

Then

Assumes you know the vocabulary.

On the Origin of SpeciesCharles Darwin, 1859
Descent with modification through natural selection accounts for the diversity and design of living things without a designer.
Book
Molecular Structure of Nucleic AcidsJames Watson & Francis Crick, 1953· 2 pages
One page proposing the double helix, with the copying mechanism noted in a single famously understated sentence.
Paper
Wonderful LifeStephen Jay Gould, 1989
Reads the Burgess Shale as evidence that evolution is contingent and would not repeat — an argument later disputed on the fossils themselves.
Book
Life's DevicesSteven Vogel, 1988
Organisms are machines operating under physical constraint, and scaling laws explain more of their design than adaptation stories do.
Book

Go deeper

Primary sources and full treatments.

The Study of InstinctNiko Tinbergen, 1951
Founds ethology by insisting animal behaviour be studied in the wild and explained at four separate levels, not one.
Book
Molecular Biology of the CellAlberts, Johnson, Lewis, Morgan, Raff, Roberts & Walter, 1983
The reference that made the cell one coherent subject rather than several, and the book most working biologists were built out of.
Book
An Introduction to Systems BiologyUri Alon, 2006
Biological networks reuse a small set of circuit motifs, and those motifs can be analysed with the same tools as engineered ones.
Book
Brock Biology of MicroorganismsMadigan, Bender, Buckley, Sattley & Stahl, 1970
The standard text, and the clearest case that microbial metabolism — not animals — is what actually runs the planet's chemistry.
Book
Plant PhysiologyLincoln Taiz & Eduardo Zeiger, 1991
The standard text on how a stationary organism solves water, light and defence — problems animals get to walk away from.
Book
Janeway's ImmunobiologyCharles Janeway et al., 1994
Organises immunity around the logic of distinguishing self from non-self, which turns an overwhelming list of cells into a system.
Book
Biological Sequence AnalysisDurbin, Eddy, Krogh & Mitchison, 1998
Grounds sequence alignment and gene finding in probabilistic models, which is why bioinformatics became statistics rather than string matching.
Book