Twentieth Century Biological Sciences
At the beginning of the 20th century, biological research was largely a professional endeavour. Most work was still done in the natural history mode, which emphasized morphological and phylogenetic analysis over experiment-based causal explanations. However, anti-vitalist experimental physiologists and embryologists, especially in Europe, were increasingly influential. The tremendous success of experimental approaches to development, heredity, and metabolism in the 1900s and 1910s demonstrated the power of experimentation in biology. In the following decades, experimental work replaced natural history as the dominant mode of research.
Read more about this topic: History Of Biology
Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, twentieth, century, biological and/or sciences:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.”
—Albert Camus (19131960)
“Who is so deaf or so blind as he
That wilfully will neither hear nor see?”
—16th century English proverb, collected in J. Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs (1546)
“Mans biological weakness is the condition of human culture.”
—Erich Fromm (19001980)
“I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.”
—Samuel Johnson (17091784)