We offer this book as a coherent account of the sweep of life's diversity and its underlying unity. Through its examples of problem solving and experiments, it shows the power of thinking critically about the natural world. It highlights key concepts, current understandings, and research trends for major fields of biological inquiry. It explains the structure and function of a broad sampling of organisms in enough detail so that students can develop a working vocabulary about life's parts and processes. - Page xvii. Throughout this book, you will come across many examples of how organisms are constructed, how they function, where they live, what they do. The examples support concepts which, when taken together, convey what "life" is. - Page 3.