Biology: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University in the Series on Science, Philosophy and Art November 20, 1907

Delivered at Columbia University in 1907, this lecture captures a pivotal moment in biological science, when the old certainties of morphology were colliding with the revolutionary insights of genetics and evolutionary theory. Edmund B. Wilson, one of America's foremost cell biologists, guides his audience through the dual nature of living organisms: their structure and their function, their visible forms and their invisible mechanisms. He traces how Darwin's theory had transformed biology into a historical science, while acknowledging the thorny philosophical questions that remained unresolved. What emerges is a portrait of biology at a crossroads, where Mendel\'s laws of inheritance were only just being absorbed into mainstream thought, where the machinery of the cell was yielding its secrets, and where scientists were still debating whether life could ever be fully explained by physical and chemical processes alone. Wilson\'s lecture stands as a historical artifact that reveals both what turn-of-the-century scientists knew and how they grappled with what they did not yet understand.