A biologia e o discurso sobre a vida: aproximações acerca do conceito de vida em livros didáticos

Abstract

This work originates from the need to question the aim of Biology: the life. The discourse on life that emanates from Biology but being confounded with the possibility of a concept for life. It occurs, that to understand ―what kind of life is that of Biology?‖, it is necessary to understand the organization movement of Biological Science and their distinctive outlooks about the several forms of life, of living creatures, as a sustenance science of Biology, or of the life discourse proclaimed by Biology. Therein, one may perceive not only the difference between the terms ―Biological Science‖ and ―Biology‖, but also the kind of connection that results from the organization of them, in the endeavour of building a statute of the unified knowledge, proper and unique from and for this one. What is placed in the next lines is an inventory about the mode how the discourse about life appears referenced in the Biology schoolbooks utilized in the private schools of Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, between the years 2000 and 2010. Comparisons, observations and ponderations about how life and the living creatures are presented and worked in these books in reference to study of the ―characteristics of living creatures‖ and the theories which treat of the ―life s origin‖. Around a ―discourse on life‖, Biology makes living arise not a concept, univocal and abstract, but as a flexible category, of classification whose limits have possibility of enlargement of that discoursive field and of their connections the more forms of life are been known, the living creatures and their singularities. That is the motion that makes a science like Biology not to exhaust and which warrants the perpetuation of a discourse on life, endowed with a certain plasticity which ends by to warrant its constant accommodation in the space among the prefixed limits of the artificial criterions of classification.