Life, outlines of general biology - PDF
Of these large and crowded volumes a brief sketch indicating the main endeavours may be of service to the reader at the beginning, and perhaps also at the close; hence a Preface, larger than is customary, may be pardoned. The aims of this book are broadly fourfold.
(a) We give in eight chapters our outline survey of Biology, in all its essential inquiries into the nature, continuance, and evolution of living beings.
(b) We illustrate with more care, and in more detail, than usual, the relations between Biology and the other Sciences — Chemistry and Physics on the one hand, to Psychology and Sociology on the other. We have also sought to show how the study of Life, as central among the sciences, and with the clear orientation of the sub-sciences of Biology, aids — we even think illumines — the old yet ever-renewing problem of the arrangement of knowledge into an adequate classification of the sciences in general, and this even within their essential fields, their own sub- sciences.
(c) Our specific presentment of Biology hence seeks to do justice between "mechanistic" and "vitalistic" doctrines, since we utilise the mechanistic advances, and even formulations, of biochemistry
and bio-physics for all they are worth, and that is much; yet also show the need of complementing these, by no less due utilisation of psychologic and neo-vitalistic viewpoints and doctrines; and this especially when these are re-stated more concretely, as here in the outline we do. For we avoid taking refuge, as older vitalists have done, and some of our contemporaries still do, in metaphysical transcendentalisms, not definitely enough related to the actual processes of Life, in Evolution, and to Life-histories as we naturalists observe them.
and bio-physics for all they are worth, and that is much; yet also show the need of complementing these, by no less due utilisation of psychologic and neo-vitalistic viewpoints and doctrines; and this especially when these are re-stated more concretely, as here in the outline we do. For we avoid taking refuge, as older vitalists have done, and some of our contemporaries still do, in metaphysical transcendentalisms, not definitely enough related to the actual processes of Life, in Evolution, and to Life-histories as we naturalists observe them.
Central to our thinking is Life's fundamental categories; of Organism, Function, and Environment; and these not merely as separately investigated, but in their varied harmonies, throughout that perpetual interaction which is the essence of Life at all its levels of being and becoming. Hence throughout this book, there is reiterated illustration of Organisms functioning in their environments, and of Environments impressing their influences on organisms. And hence, for each and every type of organism, we further seek to appreciate, as far as may be, its Psycho-basis as well as its Bio-psychosis; in other words, its Mind-body as well as its Body-mind. {d) Besides such expositions and orientations, we submit to the reader various personal contributions, old and new, and outlined a little more fully below — such as our Metabolic
Theory of Sex, a conception of the Cell-Cycle, arrangement of the diverse types of Animal Behaviour, and fuller analyses of various familiar biological concepts, which have become somewhat conventionalised, such as Reversion, Parasitism, and the Influence of the Environment. Such contributions include, especially in the last quarter of the book, many human and social applications of Biology — medical, eugenic, educational, and even civic.