Arguments about what life is and how it should be studied.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
Francis Darwin (ed.) · 1887
Darwin's son assembles his father's autobiography, correspondence and notebooks into the first authoritative account of how the theory of evolution…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Micrographia
Robert Hooke · 1665
Describes cork viewed under a microscope as made of tiny walled compartments and names them cells, founding the observational vocabulary biology…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Mechanistic Conception of Life
Jacques Loeb · 1912
Argues every process in a living organism, including instinct and reproduction, will eventually be explained in the same physico-chemical terms as…
+5 more at this level
10 works
Francis 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 2026Robert Hooke
Describes cork viewed under a microscope as made of tiny walled compartments and names them cells, founding the observational vocabulary biology would use for two centuries before anyone knew what a cell actually did.
about 10 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace
The joint paper read to the Linnean Society in which Darwin and Wallace, working independently, announce the same theory of natural selection a year before On the Origin of Species.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jay Odenbaugh & Paul Griffiths
Surveys the questions distinctive to biology as a science -- whether it has laws, what function-talk means, how species and fitness should be defined -- as a field in its own right.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jacques Loeb
Argues every process in a living organism, including instinct and reproduction, will eventually be explained in the same physico-chemical terms as any other natural phenomenon, against the claim that life requires a force outside physics.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Rosalind Franklin & Raymond Gosling
Publishes the X-ray diffraction evidence for a helical DNA structure that Watson and Crick used, without her knowledge, to build their model in the companion paper alongside it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marc Ereshefsky
Surveys the many rival definitions of 'species' biologists have proposed, and argues the persistent disagreement reflects real facts about how lineages diversify, not sloppy terminology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Elisabeth Lloyd
Distinguishes the different levels -- gene, individual, group -- at which natural selection can act, and shows how apparent cases of group selection often resolve into selection at lower levels.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Massimo Pigliucci
Argues the mid-century Modern Synthesis is too narrow to accommodate plasticity, epigenetics and evo-devo, and that evolutionary theory needs an explicit extension rather than piecemeal patching.
Ingo Brigandt & Alan Love
Distinguishes several different senses of 'reductionism' at stake in biology and argues molecular biology's success came from method and tools, not from replacing higher-level explanations.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.