Science as a Way of Knowing

Science was not always the dominant way of knowing, as we see in this exploration of how human beings over the millennia have sought to understand the phenomena of life. Central to the puzzle are several questions: How did living matter arise, and how does it reproduce itself? How does life develop from a single cell into a complex organism? And how did the vast variety of species we see around us, and those long-extinct, come to be? One of the intellectual wonders of our time has been biologists' gradual solution of these great mysteries, beginning with the investigations of Aristotle and the Greeks, continuing through the experiments and theories of Darwin and his contemporaries, and culminating in the researches of 20th-century geneticists, developmental biologists, paleontologists, and other specialists.