Biology
Biology comes from the Greek words bioV and logoV and indicates the study of life and living beings (plants, animals and human beings). It deals with the characteristics and the classification of the organisms and their behavior, and the interactions they have with each other and with the natural environment.
Biology includes a broad range of academic disciplines, from biophysics to botanics, from microbiology to ecology.
Biology tries to explain phenomena such as birth, growth, aging, death and decay of living organisms, similarities between offspring and their parents (heredity) and flowering of plants which have puzzled humanity throughout history. Biology is divided into three main branches, namely botany, related to the study of plants, zoology, concerned with the study of animals, and anthropology, the branch of biology which studies human beings. At the molecular scale, life is studied by the disciplines of molecular biology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics. More fundamental is biophysics which deals with energy within biological systems.
The cell level is studied by cellular biology. Physiology, anatomy, and histology study the living organisms at multicellular scale. Ethology considers the behaviour of organisms in their natural environment. Genetics studies heredity, i.e., the tendency of parents to transmit genetic qualities to their offsprings, while population genetics looks at the genetic patterns of an entire population.
Although many different aspects are studied, the basic biological phenomena are subject to the same physical laws that are valid in other branches of science, such as the laws of thermodynamics and the mass conservation.