ABSTRACT
To comprehend the ways in which biology has shaped the study of plants, one must, by prelude, grasp something of the role of biology in the sciences. The term “sciences” is purposeful because many disciplines comprise them. All sciences share the same method, so there is value, too, in the word “science” to encompass this method. I mean, of course, the scientic method, though it is not my concern at the moment. I wish to construct a simple notion of science as the systematic study of the natural world. It is fashionable in some circles to conceive of science as the outgrowth of the labors that spanned Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicholas Copernicus to British polymath Isaac Newton, but science is much older, tracing its roots to classical Greece.1 The pre-Socratic philosophers, Greek philosopher Plato (Figure 1.1) noted in the Apology, aimed to identify the elements upon which the world was built.2 According to Plato, his mentor Socrates showed an interest in this inquiry but nally came to crisis. Socrates determined that scientic inquiry made no difference in how he lived his life. He henceforth devoted his energies to exploring the issue of how one should create a purposeful life. The concern seems almost existential, but it is possible to exaggerate the Socratic break with science, as British classicist Francis Cornford did.3 Although Plato shared Socrates’ desire to craft a meaningful life, Plato did not ignore science. Indeed, in the Timaeus, a late dialog, Plato concerned himself with describing how the universe came into being.4 It is enough to say that Plato had scientic interests that Greek intellectuals shared. In this context, the Harvard University biologist Ernst Mayr may have been too hasty in depicting Plato’s corpus as an impediment to scientic advancement.5 As a generalization, the Romans were more engineers than scientists, though the demise of the Greco-Roman world, surely by the fth century CE, appears to have put the sciences into eclipse. Faith rather than science characterized the medieval world, although the dazzling achievements of the early modern world heightened the status of the sciences.
