Principles Biology

[Leanna Perr]

Thiscourse provides a survey of fundamental biological principles for non-science majors. Emphasis is placed on basic chemistry, cell biology, metabolism, genetics, evolution, ecology, diversity, and other related topics. Upon completion, students should be able to demonstrate increased knowledge and better understanding of biology as it applies to everyday life.

Note: In accordance with the Comprehensive Articulation Agreement, this course has been approved to satisfy the Universal General Education Transfer Component requirement for natural sciences in A.A. and A.S. degree programs. This course has been approved to meet the natural sciences requirement in A.A.S. degree programs.

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* The estimated amount of time this product will be on the market is based on a number of factors, including faculty input to instructional design and the prior revision cycle and updates to academic research-which typically results in a revision cycle ranging from every two to four years for this product. Pricing subject to change at any time.

Principles of Biology is reflective of the shift taking place in the majors biology course from large and detail rich to short and conceptual, with a focus on new, cutting-edge science. A succinct and inviting text focused on central concepts, Principles of Biology helps students connect fundamental principles while challenging them to develop and hone critical thinking skills.

Eric P. Widmaier received his Ph.D. in 1984 in Endocrinology from the University of California at San Francisco. His postdoctoral training was in endocrinology and physiology at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA. He is currently Professor of Biology at Boston University.

Rob Brooker (Ph.D., Yale University) received his B.A. in biology at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio, in 1978. At Harvard, he studied lactose permease, the product of the lacY gene of the lac operon. He continues working on transporters at the University of Minnesota, where he is a Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development and has an active research laboratory. At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Brooker teaches undergraduate courses in biology, genetics, and cell biology. In addition to many other publications, he has written two undergraduate genetics texts published by McGraw Hill.

Linda Graham is Professor of Botany and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has taught a nonmajors plant biology course each year for more than 20 years. She also teaches courses on the biology of algae and bryophytes, contributes to an introductory biology course for majors, and has taught marine botany on a remote tropical island.

Peter Stiling is a professor of biology at the University of South Florida at Tampa. He has taught classes in ecology, environmental science, and community ecology, and in 1995 he received a teaching award in recognition of classroom excellence in these areas. Dr. Stiling obtained his Ph.D. from University College, Cardiff, Wales, and completed postdoctoral research at Florida State University.

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This course is designed to introduce biology at an entry level by examining the hierarchy that ranges from the fundamentals of cell biology to the physiology of organisms, and the interactions among those organisms in their environment. The topics in this course include cell biology, genetics, molecular biology, evolution, physiology, and ecology.

Before you enroll in a course, check with your school of choice to make sure they will accept your transfer credits and to understand any requirements or limitations. Then you can request your transcripts.

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Biological Principles is an active-learning class that will introduce you to basic principles of modern biology, including evolution, ecological relationships, biomacromolecules, bioenergetics, cell structure, and genetics. This course will help you develop critical scientific skills that include hypothesis testing, experimental design, data analysis and interpretation, and scientific communication. Class time will include a variety of team-based activities designed to clarify and apply new ideas by answering questions, drawing diagrams, analyzing primary literature, and explaining medical or ecological phenomena in the context of biological principles. We will spend class time on building your comprehension of the material you find the most difficult, based on pre-class assessments.

This textbook is editorially agile to keep pace with the course as it develops. We craft content for readers carefully, and then seek reader feedback. If you see blue text while you read, that reflects text (or images) changed in real time during the semester to help you better work with and learn the course material.

The UN SDGs, or United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are a set of 17 global goals that were adopted by all United Nations Member States as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. The pages within this book have been deliberately connected to these goals to show the relevance of course content to solving real-world problems.

Biological Principles is an online, open education resource written and curated by faculty in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Groundbreaking research on the universality and diversity of microorganisms is now challenging the life sciences to upgrade fundamental theories that once seemed untouchable. To fully appreciate the change that the field is now undergoing, one has to place the epochs and foundational principles of Darwin, Mendel, and the modern synthesis in light of the current advances that are enabling a new vision for the central importance of microbiology. Animals and plants are no longer heralded as autonomous entities but rather as biomolecular networks composed of the host plus its associated microbes, i.e., "holobionts." As such, their collective genomes forge a "hologenome," and models of animal and plant biology that do not account for these intergenomic associations are incomplete. Here, we integrate these concepts into historical and contemporary visions of biology and summarize a predictive and refutable framework for their evaluation. Specifically, we present ten principles that clarify and append what these concepts are and are not, explain how they both support and extend existing theory in the life sciences, and discuss their potential ramifications for the multifaceted approaches of zoology and botany. We anticipate that the conceptual and evidence-based foundation provided in this essay will serve as a roadmap for hypothesis-driven, experimentally validated research on holobionts and their hologenomes, thereby catalyzing the continued fusion of biology's subdisciplines. At a time when symbiotic microbes are recognized as fundamental to all aspects of animal and plant biology, the holobiont and hologenome concepts afford a holistic view of biological complexity that is consistent with the generally reductionist approaches of biology.

Copyright: 2015 Bordenstein, Theis. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Funding: This publication was made possible by National Science Foundation ( ) grants DEB 1046149 and IOS 1456778 to SRB, and IOS 0920505 to KRT. KRT was supported, in part, by the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action (National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement DBI 0939454). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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