Our goal is to present the key observations andunifying concepts upon which modern biology isbased
it is not a survey of all biology! Onceunderstood, these foundational observations andconcepts should enable you to approach any biologicalprocess, from disease to kindness, from a scientificperspective. To understand biological systems we need toconsider them from two complementary perspectives
how they came to be (the historic, that is, evolutionary) and how their structures, traits, and behaviors areproduced (the mechanistic, that is, the physicochemical).