Lecture 7: The Biological Revolution - What is Life?
What is the nature of life? In this lecture I will review the revolution \nin biological thinking that has dramatically changed how we view life. \nI will review such persistent ancient ideas as spontaneous generation \nand why it took so long to disprove this notion, the impact of the \nmicroscope on biology, and the discovery of the laws and agency of heredity.\nThis is obviously a highly-selective view of a vast topic, and my goal is \nto highlight those episodes in the history of biology that inform us about \nthe nature of science (its successes and failures), and which we will concern\nourselves with in the rest of the course. Listeners will note that I do\nnot introduce Evolution (more precisely, Natural Selection) since that\nis a huge other topic for another day. Recorded live on 2009 Oct 1 in\nRoom 1005 Smith Laboratory on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State\nUniversity.