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American Zoologist 1989 29(3):1067-1074; doi:10.1093/icb/29.3.1067
© 1989 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
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Biology's "Phoenix": Historical Perspectives on the Importance of the Organism1

KEITH R. BENSON
Department of Medical History and Ethics, University of Washington Seattle, Washington 98195

From Aristotle through the nineteenth century, biology was directed to investigating the organism. In this tradition, natural historians utilized a descriptive methodology to study the structure and function of the organism. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a number of factors contributed to reorient biological investigations methodologically; that is, biologists searched for causal explanations, borrowing methods from physics and chemistry. These methods have characterized the bulk of biological research during the twentieth century, thereby ignoring the importance of the organism as a whole. Several contemporary biologists have critically evaluated this situation and have attempted to formulate biological methods that would once again consider the entire organism as the central focus for biological investigation.


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