Book Title: Inanimate Life

Author: George M. Briggs

Cover image for Inanimate Life

Book Description: Return to milneopentextbooks.org to download PDF and other versions of this text

Inanimate Life is an open textbook covering a very traditional biological topic, botany, in a non-traditional way. Rather than a phylogenetic approach, going group by group, the book considers what defines organisms and examines four general areas of their biology: structure (size, shape, composition and how it comes to be); reproduction (including sex when present); energy and material needs, acquisition and manipulations; and finally their interactions with conditions and with other organisms including agricultural interactions between plants and people.  Although much of the text is devoted to vascular plants, the book comparatively considers ‘EBA = everything but animals’ (hence the title): plants, photosynthetic organisms that are not plants (‘algae’, as well as some bacteria and archaebacteria), fungi, and ‘fungal-like’ organisms. The book includes brief ‘fact sheets’ of  fifty-nine organisms/groups that biologists should be aware of, ranging from the very familiar (corn, yeast, pines) to the unfamiliar  (cryptophytes, diatoms, late-blight of potato).  These groups reflect the diversity of inanimate life.

This updated edition was published in July 2022 and includes corrections, revisions, additional figures, and fact-sheets for several more groups.

License:
Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

Contents

Book Information

Book Description

Inanimate Life is an open textbook covering a very traditional biological topic, botany, in a non-traditional way. Rather than a phylogenetic approach, going group by group, the book considers what defines organisms and examines four general areas of their biology: structure (size, shape, composition and how it comes to be); reproduction (including sex when present); energy and material needs, acquisition and manipulations; and finally their interactions with conditions and with other organisms including agricultural interactions between plants and people. Although much of the text is devoted to vascular plants, the book comparatively considers ‘EBA = everything but animals’ (hence the title): plants, photosynthetic organisms that are not plants (‘algae’, as well as some bacteria and archaebacteria), fungi, and ‘fungal-like’ organisms. The book includes brief ‘fact sheets’ of  fifty-nine organisms/groups that biologists should be aware of, ranging from the very familiar (corn, yeast, pines) to the unfamiliar  (cryptophytes, diatoms, late-blight of potato). These groups reflect the diversity of inanimate life.

This updated edition was published in July 2022 and includes corrections, revisions, additional figures, and fact-sheets for several more groups. 

Author

George M. Briggs

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Inanimate Life Copyright © 2021 by George M. Briggs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Subject

Botany and plant sciences

Metadata

Title
Inanimate Life
Author
George M. Briggs
License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Inanimate Life Copyright © 2021 by George M. Briggs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Version 2.0

Primary Subject
Botany and plant sciences
Publisher
Milne Open Textbooks
Print ISBN
978-1-942341-82-6