Biology Page
Our size and perspective as vertebrate animals biases our perspective of the living
world. As recently as the 1980s, it was widely thought that the 'five kingdom' view -
animals, plants, fungi, protists and bacteria - offered a reasonable model of the
diversity of life. Since then, gene sequencing techniques have enabled us to view the very
nature of living material, and have revealed that the forms of life most familiar to us,
and occupying the largest share of our attention, comprise only a fraction of just one of
three vast 'super-kingdoms.' The vast majority of the diversity of life occurs entirely
within the bacteria (read more).
This page offers a broad (and necessarily idiosyncratic) range of selected topics from
the whole field of biology, with an emphasis upon the diversity of life.
Biology Page