Retell Lecture

Welcome to your very first tutorial in biology. Now, in this video series what I want to do is I want to talk to you guys about many different topics concerning biology. For example, I want to talk to you guys about DNA and genetics in cells, in bacteria, in life and a whole bunch of interesting stuff. But since this is the very first video, I think what we should do in this video is just stick with the very basics. And the first thing I want to do is talk to you guys about what is biology. So, let's go ahead and answer that question. And the definition of biology is this: the study of life in living organisms. All right, that makes sense up to a certain point up until organisms, because you may have heard of organisms before. And you may have your own definition but the scientific definition of an organism is a living thing. Well, that's easy. We know what living things are. I'm a living thing, plants, grass is a living thing. My puppy named old Dan, cutest puppy ever, by the way, is a living thing but whenever we talk about living things. Believe it or not, things get kind of complicated, because then you have to ask yourself 'what is life'. Well, of course, if you ask your grandma or your best friend or even if you ask a philosopher 'what is life', everyone is going to give you kind of a different definition of their outlook on life. However, whenever scientist and biologists were first deciding, you know what, what is life? That's the problem that they had everyone had their own separate definition of life itself. So, what they need to do before biology was even invented, which is, of course the study of life, is scientists need to agree on the definition of life.