A History of Biology

A bit dry, textbook-like, with occasional interesting observations. It began to become hard for me from 20th century on - I don't know anything beyond high school biology and was constantly googling and looking up encyclopedia and dictionaries to figure out what he was describing. Informative and wi......more

4.5 stars I read this because I was increasingly engaging in the analytic of metabolism for my thesis, but felt very out of my depth when engaging in the history of biology and biochemistry, which I first noticed when doing RA work on animalcules and the history of microbiology. This was very interest......more

This is an extremely comprehensive look at the history of biology, from its beginnings alongside philosophy to the modern worlds of neuroscience and genomic sequencing. It is, by its own admission, a tale of western biology. There are elements of middle eastern and eastern science, but only where th......more

I ended up actually enjoying this book on the whole. At first, and at a few points throughout, I thought the book was not my cup of tea because it was vague and the descriptions felt a little too short. But then when the book was over, I did still feel it dragged a bit, but it covered so many topics......more

A fine review of the history of biology for a lay audience.......more