Athro, Limited Biology Introduction

Biology is the science of living things. Doing biology is asking questions about living things.

So, what is life?

Is a virus alive? Are prions alive? Is the earth alive?

These pages are intended as an introduction to the key ideas of biology at an advanced high school or introductory college level. At this time they can be used as a series of supplements to course materials. The long term goal of this site is to become an interactive biology textbook.

There are a multitude of different ways of approaching biology. I have chosen to organize these pages around two main themes: Evolution and Scale. Evolution is the central idea of all biology. Biological systems also operate at many different spatial and temporal scales. These range from the very small scales of biochemistry to the very large scales of ecology. These pages examine the evolution of biological processes at the molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecological scales. An entirely different approach to these same pages involves thinking about methods of scientific inquiry.