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Required reading:

Themes In Biology: Levels Of Biological Organisation & The Emergence Of New Properties At Each Level

At every level of biological hierarchy function (what something does) is related to how it is structured (its shape, what it is made of, arrangement of parts).

A hammer’s function is to be used by humans to drive nails into wood. It is structured with a handle so that we may swing it. It has a heavy solid head to increase the force with which it can strike a nail. The head has a flat part to strike with. So structure is related to, correlated with, function.

Bellow is an example of a bird’s wing. At the level of the organ system that is the wing we can see that it is aerodynamically shaped (structure) for efficient flying (function).

At the level of the tissues of the bones in the wing we see a honeycombed structure that is strong and lightweight, helping to enable flight.

At the level of the nerve cells that transmit signals to the muscles in the wing (function) we see they are long and well structured for communication within the body (structure).

At the level of a mitochondrion organelle we can see that the inner membrane has many infoldings (structure) which allows a greater surface area for the chemical reactions that help power flight (function).

This correlation of structure and function is present at the molecular level also, as we shall see in future posts.

(Campbell, Reece, et al, 2008, “Biology”)

Scientists, when examining fossil evidence, can look at the structure of bones, for example hip bones, and make predictions about what they were used for.

For example; is the shape of the hip bones such as to support the organism’s weight in an upright position? If the hip bones were structured in such a bowl shaped manner it would suggest that the organism was a habitual biped (walked on two legs).