Students can describe a concept but have a limited understanding of it. Students recognize personal deficiencies in knowledge of skill, 2. obtain additional knowledge of skills, and 3. apply knowledge of a concept to related subjects 4. and to solve a problem or answer a question. One can think of the unifying principles as branches on a tree that has evolution as its trunk and the facts of biology as its leaves. An understanding of the trunk and branches of the biological tree constitutes structural biological literacy, whereas functional literacy focuses on the leaves alone and when the leaves fall, the facts are forgotten. A student reaches structural biological literacy when he or she understands a subject well enough to explain it to another person in his or her own words.
Biologists study living systems.
There are millions of different species of organisms on Earth today, and one goal of biologists is to understand how these species differ from one another. Living systems, however, also have many characteristics in common, and the principles on which biology is founded apply to all organisms. The unifying principles help to organize the biological content of a course, and they should play a central role in the design of any curriculum study. The Biology 100 curriculum outlines six unifying principles that organize biological concepts and that we suggest educators use to help unify the disparate facts of biology. These twenty major concepts were developed in the context of the unifying principles described above.