Review Article, Res J Zool Vol: 1 Issue: 1

Modern Zoology as a “Classical” Branch of Biology has Developed to Play an Integrative Role with a Focus on the Whole Organism

Schwerte T^*

Institute of Zoology, University of Innsbruck, Techniker Str. 25, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria

*Corresponding Author : Thorsten Schwerte
Institute of Zoology, University of Innsbruck, Techniker Str. 25, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Tel: 004351250751862
Fax: 00435125072930
E-mail: Thorsten.Schwerte@uibk.ac.at

Received: October 04, 2017 Accepted: Janurary 03, 2018 Published: Janurary 08, 2018

Citation: Schwerte T (2018) Modern Zoology as a “Classical” Branch of Biology has Developed to Play an Integrative Role with a Focus on the Whole Organism. Res J Zool 1:1.

Abstract

Keywords: Zoology; Natural History; Ecosystem

Abbreviations

5-ht: 5-Hydroxytryptamine; Ache: Acetylcholinesterase; Ae: Aedes (Mosquito); Ag: Silver; Gnps: Silver Nano Particles; Ar: Androgen Receptor; ca²⁺: Calcium; Cd: Cadmium; DNA; Deoxyribonucleic Acid; e2: Estradiol; Gaba: Gamma Amino Butyric Acide; Gh: Growth Hormone; Gnrh: Gonadotropin-Releasing-Hormone; Gth: Gonadotropin; Hiv-1: Human Immunideficiency Virus; Hsp70: Heat Shock Protein 70; Igf-i: Insulin-like Growth Factor; Lh: Luteinizing Hormone; Mhc: Major Histocompatibility Complex; Mirnas: Micro RNAs; Nh3: Ammonia; Nps: Nano Particles; Ni: Nickel; P53: Protein P53; Pd: Parkinsons Disease; Pkc: Protein Kinase C; Prl: Prolactin; T3: Triiodo-L-Thyronine; T4: L-Thyroxine

Introduction

The conceptual change of zoology as a science

The term zoology in this study means the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals and their interaction with the biotic and abiotic environment.

Zoology as a science and “classical” field of biology has a long history of more than 2000 years. The history of zoology traces the study of the animal kingdom from ancient to modern times. Zoological sciences emerged from natural history reaching back to the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world. The concept of zoology as a single coherent field arose much later over the 18th and 19^th century [1,2] and is one of the natural sciences attracting most public attention [3]. In contrast to this, zoology as a scientific field occasionally is considered to be old-fashioned [4]. Reason for this was emerging of more specialized zoology related sub-disciplines as a result of focusing on selected aspects of animal biology. As a consequence, zoology as a science was more and more replaced by a number of autonomous research areas, focusing different levels of the “system life”: molecules, cells, tissues, regulation and adaptation, model animals or whole ecosystems. Someone may ask for a strategy for how to keep these fragmented topics together. A look into the history of sciences reveals the answer.

It was in the 1940’s when the idea came up to counteract these dynamics by defining systems principles that keep science togethersystems theory was born. This minorize was proposed by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and furthered by Ross Ashby [5,6]. Although those ideas and concepts were quite technical and catalyzed the loss of the term “organism” by more and more replacing it by “system” [7]. Nevertheless, the basic ideas were attempts to revive the unity of science and reacting against reductionism. Von Bertalanffy emphasized that real systems are open to, and interact with, their environments. Furthermore, they can gain qualitatively new emergent features, resulting in continual evolution.

In the time system theory came up another topic led to disruptive changes. Molecular biology was established in the 1930’s [8] and was always an interdisciplinary field (chemistry, biochemistry, and genetics). Advances in the modern molecular biological methodology rapidly enabled researchers in “classical” fields of biology, like zoology and botany, to develop the hypothesis for their observations that have the power to explain phenomena and emergent systems properties on different levels of organization. But can we explain life on a whole organism level with molecular biology alone? Astbury described molecular biology as: “...not so much a technique as an approach, an approach from the viewpoint of the so-called basic sciences with the leading idea of searching below the large-scale manifestations of classical biology for the corresponding molecular plan. It is concerned particularly with the forms of biological molecules and [...] is predominantly three-dimensional and structural-which does not mean, however, that it is merely a refinement of morphology. It must at the same time inquire into genesis and function.” [9]. Without doubts, molecular methods added a high value to many aspects of classical fields of biology. Today, researchers are always asked to explain the underlying mechanisms and in most cases, they end up in molecular biological experiments.

But, researchers, especially those with their roots in classic zoology, should always keep in mind the question “What does this mean to the whole animal?”. There is still a need for researchers with a holistic view of the results of modern life sciences. Jörg Albrecht, a German science journalist, and biologist asked the question if there is a future for classical zoology and botany. In his article, he came to the answer “Specialists like to divide the flora and fauna into ever smaller portions, here a cell, there a carbon compound, here an atom, there a neutrino, to the end everything consists of quarks. The secret of life cannot be deciphered on that level, because an animal, a plant, a bacterium, even a virus is always very much more than the sum of its parts. This is why: generalists, desperately sought” [10]. Is it true that zoology is outcompeted by other disciplines? And is it true that analysis on the whole organism level is losing importance?

Re-evolution of the concept of zoology

In the last decade, a process started to evolve the former “old fashioned” zoology into a modern zoology, which serves as an integrative discipline encompassing all aspects of animal life, from the level of the gene to the level of the ecosystem.

The current challenge of the modern zoology is the re-integration of zoological disciplines and simultaneously taking advantage of a broader approach to the holistic study of animal life. This is reflected by the increasing number of new zoology journals, like Zoo Keys, Frontiers in Zoology, International Journal of Zoology, Archives of Zoological Studies and Research Journal of Zoology (the journal, you are reading right now). How did the semantic content of zoology publications change when focusing on the question if molecular biology still displaces the concept of the organism?

In the following, some superficial analysis of the major zoological research topics using the bibliographic information in the database PubMed with the search term “zoology” in title and abstract fields is presented. From 67.475 hits 5404 were excluded (incomplete database entries, like missing titles) and the remaining 62.071 were imported in RefViz 2 (Thompson Reuters, New York). RefViz is data mining software for reference databases like PubMed. It provides a similarity-based clustering by statistical analysis of the vocabulary in the Titles and Abstracts of the reference set and how the terms in that vocabulary were categorized during processing. Major Topics are the terms that best distinguish sets of references - they are the most important concepts. Minor topics are less distinguishing, but have some influence on the grouping of references through their co-occurrence with the major topics. Words that are too frequent or too infrequent to help define groups of references, or they are not distributed in a manner that would help distinguish groups are excluded. PubMed^® uses the MeSH index to find references with related concepts; thus, the query “zoology” itself may not necessarily appear in the reference itself.

For the current study, three subsets of publication year periods 1918-1999, 2000-2011 and 2012-2017 were analyzed for their most dominant (distinguishing) and minor (less distinguishing) topics. The results are shown in Table 1 (sorted by number of term occurrence) and Table 2 (alphabetically sorted). Table 3 shows the number of terms indicating the whole organismic level compared to the molecular level. The whole organismic level terms show an increase by 41% in contrast to terms indicating the molecular level, which decreased by more than 50 % both when comparing publications of the past 5 years to the period of 1918-1999. Although these numbers only represent a superficial analysis, they show the trend that the whole organism level in zoology publications can expect a renaissance. A reason for this may be the fact, that the number of animal models increases (bat, snail, ant, turtle, hamster, earthworm) as well as the number of important animals transferring human diseases (e.g. mosquito) or being of agri-and aquaculture interests (bee, honeybee, salmon/ fish, locust, deer, goat, buffalo) are increasing. The Kroghs Principle (in modern language) “Among the diversity of animal species there will be one ideally suited as an experimental model for any biological problem” [11,12] is still and even more true in the modern world of science.

Table 1: Text analysis of the top 64 major zoological research topics using the bibliographic information in the database PubMed with the search term “zoology” in title and abstract. From 67.475 hits 5404 were excluded (incomplete database entries, like missing titles). The periods 1918-1999, 2000-2011 and 2012-2017 were analyzed for their most dominant (distinguishing) and minor (less distinguishing) topics in order of term occurrence. Terms in italics indicates topics on the molecular level. Terms in bold indicates topics on the whole organism level. n=16222 (1918 - 1999), 22222 (2000 - 2011) and 23627 (2012 - 2017) respectively.

Table 2: Text analysis of the top 64 major zoological research topics using the bibliographic information in the database PubMed with the search term “zoology” in title and abstract. From 67.475 hits 5404 were excluded (incomplete database entries, like missing titles). The periods 1918 – 1999, 2000 – 2011 and 2012 – 2017 were analyzed for their most dominant (distinguishing) and minor (less distinguishing) topics in alphabetical order of terms. Terms in italics indicates topics on the molecular level. Terms in bold indicates topics on the whole organism level. n=16222 (1918 - 1999), 22222 (2000 - 2011) and 23627 (2012 - 2017) respectively.

Table 3: Text analysis of the top 64 major zoological research topics using the bibliographic information in the database PubMed with the search term “zoology” in title and abstract. From 67.475 hits 5404 were excluded (incomplete database entries, like missing titles). The periods 1918-1999, 2000-2011 and 2012-2017 were analyzed for terms indicating molecular or organism level. n=64.

Conclusion

Zoology as a science has a future. Modern zoology has an important integrative role with a focus on the organism level and a holistic understanding of structures and functions. Besides the molecular level model animals have to be characterized on the whole organism level as well and the question that always has to be kept in mind is “What does it mean to the (whole) animal?”

References

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