List of people considered father or mother of a scientific field
Biology

List of people considered father or mother of a scientific field

Section Title: Biology
Table Section Text: None

Field	Person/s considered "father" or "mother"	Rationale

Bacteriology	Robert Koch / Ferdinand Cohn / Louis Pasteur	First to produce precise, correct descriptions of bacteria.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Biogeography	Alfred Russel Wallace	"...Often described as the Father of Biogeography, Wallace shows the impact of human activity on the natural world."

Biology	Aristotle

Botany	Theophrastus

Cheloniology	Archie Carr

Ecology	Carl Linnaeus / Ernst Haeckel / Eugenius Warming	Linnaeus founded an early branch of ecology that he called The Economy of Nature (1772), Haeckel coined the term "ecology" (German: Oekologie, Ökologie) (1866), Warming authored the first book on plant ecology.

Entomology	Jan Swammerdam

Johan Christian Fabricius	Fabricius described and published information on over 10,000 insects and refined Linnaeus's system of classification.

William Kirby

Ethology	Nikolaas Tinbergen Karl von Frisch Konrad Lorenz	The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, joint awardees of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

EvolutionNatural selection	Charles Darwin	On the Origin of Species (1859).

Genetics	Gregor Mendel	For his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants, which forms the basis for Mendelian inheritance.

William Bateson	Proponent of Mendelism.

Herpetology	John Edwards Holbrook	"John Edwards Holbrook... was considered by many to be the Father of Herpetology."

Ichthyology	Peter Artedi	"Far greater than either of these… was he who has been justly called the Father of Ichthyology, Petrus (Peter) Artedi (1705–35)."

Lichenology	Erik Acharius	"Erik Acharius, the father of lichenology..."

Microbiology	Antonie van Leeuwenhoek / Louis Pasteur	The first to microscopically observe micro-organisms in water and the first to see bacteria.

Molecular biology	Linus Pauling

Molecular biophysics	Gopalasamudram Narayana Iyer Ramachandran	Founded the [world's first?] molecular biophysics unit (1970).

Paleontology	Leonardo da Vinci George Cuvier

Parasitology	Francesco Redi	The founder of experimental biology and the first person to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies.

Protozoology	Antonie van Leeuwenhoek	First to produce precise, correct descriptions of protozoa.

Taxonomy	Carl Linnaeus	Devised the system of naming living organisms that became universally accepted in the scientific world.

Virology	Dmitry Ivanovsky Martinus Beijerinck	The first men to discover viruses (1892).

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