3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

The course surveys the emergence and development of life sciences since the 1700s. It examines major ideas, approaches, and debates regarding life, along with their material and cultural underpinnings as well as social impacts. One crucial question throughout the course is how social and cultural contexts have shaped views of life at particular times and places. Topics include natural history, classification, morphology, cell theory, physiology, evolution, genetics and eugenics, molecular biology, biomedicine, and biotechnology. Lectures are supplemented with discussions about primary historical texts and scholarly articles. Students will learn about the course content, methods in historical inquiries of scientific fields, and will develop an original research essay as a final project.