What is the nature of life? In this lecture I will review the revolution
in biological thinking that has dramatically changed how we view life.
I will review such persistent ancient ideas as spontaneous generation
and why it took so long to disprove this notion, the impact of the
microscope on biology, and the discovery of the laws and agency of heredity.
This is obviously a highly-selective view of a vast topic, and my goal is
to highlight those episodes in the history of biology that inform us about
the nature of science (its successes and failures), and which we will concern
ourselves with in the rest of the course. Listeners will note that I do
not introduce Evolution (more precisely, Natural Selection) since that
is a huge other topic for another day. Recorded live on 2009 Oct 1 in
Room 1005 Smith Laboratory on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State
University.