Welcome to the Critical Biology Studies home page!  Most of us who love biology are excited by what it purports to study: life, the diversity and richness of it, and the conditions that sustain it. Developments in the field continue to reveal the sheer dynamicity and agency of the living world that we inhabit.

The challenge for biologists, therefore, has been to build theories and explanations that can account for the dynamicity and variation in the living world, and what makes the Life Sciences especially exciting is the rapid development in and revisions of explanations that exist regarding fundamental ideas such as heredity, evolution and development in the 19th and 20th century.

Since biology is the science of life, we find its theories and explanations also put to instrumental use. While the insights from biological sciences have had a tremendous positive impact on the field of medical sciences, we also find that such knowledge allies with power to find expression in heinous state sponsored pogroms such as the holocaust of early 20th century, rationalized by the science of eugenics.

Unlike the more naturalist and observational nature of biological sciences of the 19th century,  20th century biological sciences has become heavily experimental and reliant on instrumentation for its functioning and hence attracts huge investment of money, both from the state and the corporate, especially pharmaceutical industry. As a result, the last few decades have witnessed a huge shift in the organization of Life Sciences, which has far reaching impacts on the nature and culture of biological sciences.

Therefore, understanding and learning biological sciences, besides requiring an appreciation of the diversity of theories and concepts that help explain it, also requires an understanding of the field from a historical, philosophical and sociological lens. This website would be interesting to all those who love biology and believe that understanding the field from a historical and sociopolitical lens is critical to doing better biology, as well as improving the conditions of those who teach and practice it.

More on the image: The beautiful image by Shoshanah Dubiner (at the top of this homepage) depicts endosymbiosis, developed by biologist Lyn Margulis, which proposes that organisms cooperate and merge to drive their evolutionary pathways.