This course will survey the development of the sciences of living nature from the mid-18th to the late-20th century. Topics include scientific and popular natural history, exploration and discovery, Darwin and evolution, cell theory, the organizational transformation of science, physiology and experimentalism, classical and molecular genetics, and the biomedical-industrial complex. Emphasis is on the formation of fundamental concepts and methods, long-term trends toward specialization, institutionalization, professionalization, and industrialization, and the place of the life sciences in modern societies. Many lectures are illustrated by slides.

This course provides an account of the origins and development of modern biology from a jointly social and conceptual perspective. Significant developments in the human knowledge of life on earth will thus be presented as both an intellectual process—the advocation and contestation of key ideas and theories through time—and as the result of the entanglement of those ideas with the cultural, political, economic, and institutional contexts in which they are produced. Students will come away from the course with an understanding of both the major problems, puzzles, and solutions that biologists wrestled with in their collective attempts to understand the phenomenon of life over the past three centuries, and the deep connections between those efforts and the unique historical environments in which they were pursued.

Credit Restrictions

Students will receive no credit for 180 after taking 180T.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills