In this article, we’ll be looking at the African perspective of the development of biology.
The development of biology has a long and complex history, and the African continent has played a significant role in this development. The study of biology in Africa dates back to ancient civilizations, where traditional knowledge and practices were used to understand and interact with the natural world. In more recent times, the study of biology in Africa has been shaped by the influence of colonialism and the global scientific community.
During the colonial period, European powers brought their own scientific practices and perspectives to Africa, and many African scholars were trained in European institutions and conducted research using Western methods. However, in the post-colonial era, there has been a growing movement to incorporate indigenous knowledge and ways of understanding into the study of biology in Africa. This has led to the development of a more diverse and inclusive approach to the study of biology on the continent.
There are many notable African biologists and scientific institutions that have made significant contributions to the field. For example, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey has made important discoveries about human evolution, and Nigerian virologist Dora Akunyili was instrumental in the fight against counterfeit drugs in her home country. The African Academy of Sciences is a pan-African organization that promotes scientific research and development on the continent, and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa is a leading research institution in Africa.
Overall, the development of biology in Africa has been shaped by a complex interplay of traditional knowledge, colonialism, and global scientific practices. It is an ongoing process that continues to evolve and be shaped by the diverse perspectives and experiences of scientists and communities across the continent.
History Of Biology
The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to Ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
This ancient work was further developed in the Middle Ages by Muslim physicians and scholars such as Avicenna. During the European Renaissance and early modern period, biological thought was revolutionized in Europe by a renewed interest in empiricism and the discovery of many novel organisms. Prominent in this movement were Vesalius and Harvey, who used experimentation and careful observation in physiology, and naturalists such as Linnaeus and Buffon who began to classify the diversity of life and the fossil record, as well as the development and behavior of organisms.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek revealed by means of microscopy the previously unknown world of microorganisms, laying the groundwork for cell theory. The growing importance of natural theology, partly a response to the rise of mechanical philosophy, encouraged the growth of natural history (although it entrenched the argument from design).
The frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin’s evolution-themed poem The Temple of Nature shows a goddess pulling back the veil from nature (in the person of Artemis). Allegory and metaphor have often played an important role in the history of biology.
Over the 18th and 19th centuries, biological sciences such as botany and zoology became increasingly professional scientific disciplines. Lavoisier and other physical scientists began to connect the animate and inanimate worlds through physics and chemistry. Explorer-naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt investigated the interaction between organisms and their environment, and the ways this relationship depends on geography—laying the foundations for biogeography, ecology and ethology.
Naturalists began to reject essentialism and consider the importance of extinction and the mutability of species. Cell theory provided a new perspective on the fundamental basis of life. These developments, as well as the results from embryology and paleontology, were synthesized in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The end of the 19th century saw the fall of spontaneous generation and the rise of the germ theory of disease, though the mechanism of inheritance remained a mystery.
In the early 20th century, the rediscovery of Mendel’s work led to the rapid development of genetics by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students, and by the 1930s the combination of population genetics and natural selection in the “neo-Darwinian synthesis”.
New disciplines developed rapidly, especially after Watson and Crick proposed the structure of DNA. Following the establishment of the Central Dogma and the cracking of the genetic code, biology was largely split between organismal biology—the fields that deal with whole organisms and groups of organisms—and the fields related to cellular and molecular biology.
By the late 20th century, new fields like genomics and proteomics were reversing this trend, with organismal biologists using molecular techniques, and molecular and cell biologists investigating the interplay between genes and the environment, as well as the genetics of natural populations of organisms
Notable African Biologists
Alan Aderem
Alan Aderem is an American biologist, specializing in immunology and cell biology. Aderem’s particular focus is the innate immune system, the part of the immune system that responds generically to pathogens. His laboratory’s research focuses on diseases afflicting citizens of resource poor countries, including AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and influenza.
Boris Balinsky
Borys Ivanovych Balinsky (23 September 1905 – 1 September 1997) was a Ukrainian and South African biologist, embryologist, entomologist, professor of Kyiv University and University of the Witwatersrand. Pioneer researcher in the field of experimental embryology, electron microscopy and developmental biology. He was author of popular textbook in embryology An Introduction to Embryology.
John B. Balinsky
John (Ivan) Boris Balinsky (July 4, 1934 in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR – October 1, 1983 in Ames, Iowa, Iowa, United States) – South African and American zoologist of Ukrainian origin. His father Boris Balinsky was an embryologist.
Sydney Brenner
Sydney Brenner CH FRS FMedSci MAE (13 January 1927 – 5 April 2019) was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
Edwin Goldmann
Edwin Goldmann (12 November 1862 – 13 August 1913) was a biomedical researcher and surgeon most famous for his contributions in first characterizing the blood–brain barrier.
Adriana Marais
Adriana Marais is a South African theoretical physicist, technologist and advocate for off-world exploration.[1] She is a director of the Foundation for Space Development Africa, an organisation aiming to send Africa’s first mission to the Moon, the Africa2Moon Project. She is the founder of Proudly Human, an initiative of which is the Off-World Project, a series of habitation experiments in Earth’s most extreme environments.
Naomi A. H. Millard
Naomi Adeline Helen Millard, née Bokenham (16 July 1914, Green Point, Cape Town – 12 June 1997) was a South African biologist, one of the founders of the Zoological Society of South Africa and the Zoologica Africana Journal.
Society for Conservation Biology Africa
The SCB Africa Section grew out of humble beginnings and now has an active membership of more than 500 individuals globally. This is the result of a meeting of thirty-five conservation scientists and practitioners who gathered in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2001 to deliberate on conservation biology issues in Africa.
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Title: African Perspective Of The Development Of Biology
REFRENCES: Wikipedia