WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, PRINGLES, SUI-SETZ, ANDRE KARWATH AKA (HOMEPAGE IMAGE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, GEORGE SHUKLIN)
For much of its history, the field of biology has been primarily focused on diversity. Many early biologists focused on the detailed observation and characterization of living organisms, and a voluminous library of descriptive data ranging across all taxonomic groups was compiled as a result. Biologists could then use this information to propose hypotheses regarding the underlying principles of an observed phenomenon.
To test such hypotheses, however, required the experimental manipulation of organisms in the field or laboratory, which wasn’t made possible until the advances of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The identification of the “laws” of heredity in the mid-1800s, for example, paved the way for the use of mutagenesis to investigate the underlying genetics of biological phenomena. But these approaches suffered from ...
