The study of evolution is the unifying concept in evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary biology
is a conceptual subfield of biology that intersects with other subfields that are delimited by
organizational level (e.g., cell biology, population biology), taxonomic level
(e.g., zoology, ornithology, herpetology) or angle of approach (e.g., field
biology, theoretical biology, experimental evolution, paleontology). Usually, these
intersections are combined into specific fields such asevolutionary
ecology and evolutionary developmental biology.

History[edit]
Main article: History of evolutionary thought
Evolutionary biology, as an academic discipline in its own right, emerged during the period
of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. It was not until the 1970s
and 1980s, however, that a significant number of universities had departments that
specifically included the term evolutionary biology in their titles, often in conjunction with
ecology and behavior. In the United States, as a result of the rapid growth
of molecular and cell biology, many universities have split (or aggregated) their biology
departments into molecular and cell biology-style departments and ecology and
evolutionary biology-style departments (which often have subsumed older departments
in botany, zoology and the like). The subdiscipline of paleontology is often found in earth
science/geology/geoscience departments.
Microbiology has recently developed into an evolutionary discipline. It was originally
ignored due to the paucity of morphological traits and the lack of a species concept in
microbiology. Now, evolutionary researchers are taking advantage of a more extensive
understanding of microbial physiology, the ease of microbialgenomics, and the quick
generation time of some microbes to answer evolutionary questions. Similar features have
led to progress in viral evolution, particularly forbacteriophages.

Important evolutionary biologists[edit]