Biology
scientific study of living things, especially their structure, function, growth, evolution, and distribution
Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution of life. Central to biology are five fundamental themes: the cell as the basic unit of life, genes and heredity as the basis of inheritance, evolution as the driver of biological diversity, energy transformation for sustaining life processes, and homeostasis, the maintenance of internal stability.
Biology examines life across multiple levels of organization, from molecules and cells to organisms, population, and ecosystems. Subdisciplines include molecular biology, physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, and systematics, among others. Each of these fields applies a range of methods to investigate biological phenomena, including observation, experimentation, and mathematical modeling. Modern biology is grounded in the theory of evolution by natural selection, first articulated by Charles Darwin, and in the molecular understanding of genes encoded in DNA. The discovery of the structure of DNA and advances in molecular genetics have transformed many areas of biology, leading to applications in medicine, agriculture, biotechnology, and environmental science.
Biologists classify organisms—from single-celled archaea and bacteria to multicellular plants, fungi, and animals—based on shared characteristics and evolutionary relationships, using taxonomic and phylogenetics.
Etymology
From Greek βίος (bíos) 'life', (from Proto-Indo-European root *gwei-, to live) and λογία (logia) 'study of'. The compound appears in the title of Volume 3 of Michael Christoph Hanow's Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae dogmaticae: Geologia, biologia, phytologia generalis et dendrologia, published in 1766.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Biology” is scientific study of living things, especially their structure, function, growth, evolution, and distribution. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Biology, scientific and study, not as a finished interpretation.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q420. The Library of Congress control number is sh85014203. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1766.
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This entry incorporates text from “Biology” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.