A Short History of Biology [Paperback]

Isaac Asimov (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Greenwood Press Reprint (1980)
• ASIN: B000OTK2W8
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Asimov strings together the concepts of Biology, July 26, 2000

By 

Alex Mikhail - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short History of Biology (Hardcover)

Most introductory biology books throw a large collection of facts in your face without really giving you any explanation of how they came to be. What makes this so hard is that the heart of biology is about details. One way of putting this is -- nomenclature (taxonomies) is to biology, as mathematics is to physics. Unfortunately, for the a "non-specialist", getting a quick introduction to the different fields of biology is difficult. Asimov slowly introduces the concepts of biology by explaining the development of this science through history. He subtly introduces the different fields of biology along with some of the famous discoveries and experiments. The difference is that he doesn't get bogged down in the details. A biologist would probably find this disappointing. However, for someone who wants to sort through the massive amounts of information on biology, this book is great. This book requires almost no prerequisite knowledge. If you read this book along with an introductory book on Biology, it will give an excellent view of some of the fundamental concepts of Biology. I don't know if a biologist would like this book, but I did. I think this book is perfect for a freshman biology (or pre-med) student or prehaps an intelligent reader (like a computer scientist who is interested in neural computation, but wants to get past the algorithms) who would like a gentle introduction into this field.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, December 16, 2001

By 

David Barry (Boston, MA (USA)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short History of Biology. (Paperback)

Asimov goes thru a sequential (historical) development of the field, explaining how biologists arrived at each new discovery. What were they looking for, and (more important), why? How did this field look in the first century? In the fifteenth? In the nineteenth? In this context, I think it's easier to understand the crucial experiments, why they were done, and their effect on the field. For someone who has had a basic (high school) biology course, this allows the reader to fit his or her understanding into a logical framework, and often makes it easier to understand what the discovery actually meant. Even for someone with no background in biology at all, this book provides a synopsis that's relatively painless to read and digest (up to the 1960s). But its real value lies in making the development of the field much clearer, explaining what we knew and when (and most importantly, how, with attendant ambiguities) we knew it. As good as his Short History of Chemistry.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biology from superstition to science, August 19, 2004

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Short History of Biology. (Paperback)

While all sciences suffer from human prejudices, that problem has been more prevalent in biology. When first proposed, many of the principles of biology have been contrary to what humans preferred to believe at that time. Asimov starts with the role of Hippocrates, where he considered epilepsy to be a disease rather than demonic possession. It is hard to understate the significance of this event. Ancient humans explained the bad things in the world by appealing to demons that seemed determined to make life miserable. By attributing events to natural causes, which could be understood, prevented and manipulated, humans began to take control of their environment.
Despite all of the current biological knowledge and the obvious benefits to society, there is still significant resistance to some of the more dominant principles of biology. Evolution is still very controversial; battles are still fought in some school districts over the role it should play in the curriculum. In this book, Asimov is at his best, capturing the science of the processes of life, as it went from an appeal to the supernatural to the understanding of the natural processes of chemistry and physics. Although it was written in 1964, this book is still a valuable resource for the study of biology. It can serve as a primer or as a brief review.