ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the external factors that incite multidisciplinarity in biology. It considers biology as a discipline and of paleo-ecology and toxicology as fields. While biology in general has faced some substantial changes, it remains an empirical question how this affects different biological fields. The traditional image of paleo-ecologists is one of patient researchers spending many hours looking through their microscopes. In a sense, biologists were already involved in multidisciplinary collaborations in the seventeenth century when they joined expeditions into the unknown world in order to collect new species. In 1998 Foundation for Life Sciences (SLW) became part of the Department of Earth and Life Sciences (ALW) of the new Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The new research council NWO regarded the rise of multidisciplinary research as an important development of the preceding decades. Multidisciplinary research collaborations involve individuals representing different scientific disciplines. Multidisciplinarity belongs to the same family of concepts as inter- and transdisciplinarity.
