Scheda di revisione: Foundations of Biology

📋 Course Outline

1. Biology and the Logic of Life
2. Central Themes of Biology
3. Hierarchy and Organization of Life
4. Cells and the Continuity of Life
5. Evolution and Biodiversity
6. Biological Inquiry Approaches
7. Transdisciplinary Biology

📖 1. Biology and the Logic of Life

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Biology : The scientific study of life and addresses questions about how cells form organisms, how body systems function, and how organisms interact in communities.

★ Must-know

• The seven characteristics of life are:
  • order
  • regulation
  • energy processing
  • growth and development
  • reproduction
  • response to the environment
  • evolutionary adaptation

Further detail

📌 Whether viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are considered living remains a question within the characterization of life.

💡 Memory Hook

OREGR: Order, Regulation, Energy processing, Growth, Reproduction, Response, evolutionary adaptation

📖 2. Central Themes of Biology

★ Must-know

• The five unifying themes of biology are (Campbell, 2020):
  • organization of life
  • flow of information
  • flow of energy and cycling of matter
  • evolution and diversity
  • interaction

Further detail

• Major global issues connected to biology include:
  • medicine
  • agriculture
  • the environment

💡 Memory Hook

O-A-E-E-I: Organization, information, energy and matter, evolution, interaction

📖 3. Hierarchy and Organization of Life

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Emergent property : A property of an organized whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, such as consciousness emerging from neural networks.

★ Must-know

• The hierarchy of biological organization runs from largest to smallest as:
  • biosphere
  • ecosystem
  • community
  • population
  • organism
  • organ
  • tissue
  • cell
  • organelle
  • molecule

Further detail

• Organisms interact with their environment by exchanging matter and energy.

💡 Memory Hook

Biosphere → ecosystem → community → population → organism → organ → tissue → cell → organelle → molecule

📖 4. Cells and the Continuity of Life

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Gene : A unit of inheritance that transfers information from parents to offspring.

★ Must-know

📌 Prokaryotic cells are small and simple, lack a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles, and include bacteria and archaea, whereas eukaryotic cells are larger and complex, contain a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles, and include plants, animals, fungi, and protists.

• Chromosomes contain DNA, and DNA controls the development and maintenance of organisms.

Further detail

• Genetic continuity occurs when DNA inherited from both parents is copied in embryo cells and transmitted to offspring, preserving inherited traits.

💡 Memory Hook

Prokaryotic cells lack a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles, whereas eukaryotic cells have both

📖 5. Evolution and Biodiversity

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Evolutionary adaptation : The accumulation of advantageous traits in a population over a long period.

★ Must-know

📌 Evolution is the idea that living species descend from ancestral species, while natural selection is the mechanism of inheritance with modification. — Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859

• Evolution explains both the unity of life through common ancestry and the diversity of life through modification as species become separated from their ancestors.

Further detail

• The estimated total number of species on Earth is 8.7 million, of which more than 1.3 million have been identified and named.

💡 Memory Hook

Inherited variation → natural selection → advantageous traits accumulate → evolutionary adaptation

📖 6. Biological Inquiry Approaches

★ Must-know

• 🔄 Hypothesis-based science proceeds through:

  1. observation
  2. question
  3. hypothesis
  4. experiment
  5. data interpretation or prediction
  6. conclusion
  7. new question

• Discovery-based science uses many specific observations to reach a general conclusion through inductive reasoning.

Further detail

• In the mimicry case study, the hypothesis is that mimicry reduces the risk of a harmless animal being eaten by a predator.

• More than 200 years of microscopic observations of biological specimens supported the conclusion that all organisms are composed of cells.

💡 Memory Hook

Hypothesis-based science begins with a testable hypothesis, whereas discovery-based science builds general conclusions from observations

📖 7. Transdisciplinary Biology

★ Must-know

• Biology is increasingly connected with:

  • chemistry
  • physics
  • mathematics
  • computer science
  • the social sciences

• The coral bleaching case combines coral-algae symbiosis in biology, ocean acidification in chemistry, rising seawater temperature in physics, and policy and economic value in the social sciences.

Further detail

📌 The growing need to study phenomena such as coral bleaching across biological, chemical, physical, and social dimensions increases the importance of transdisciplinary biology.

💡 Memory Hook

A coral reef connected by four strands: biology, chemistry, physics, and social science

📊 Synthesis Tables

Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells

Feature	Prokaryotic cells	Eukaryotic cells
Organization	Simple and small	Complex and large
Nucleus	Absent	Present
Membrane-bound organelles	Absent	Present
Examples	Bacteria and archaea	Plants, animals, fungi, and protists