Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the structure of the heart and explain how cardiac muscle is different from other musclesDescribe the cardiac cycleExplain the structure of arteries, veins, and capillaries, and how blood flows through the body

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the structure of the heart and explain how cardiac muscle is different from other musclesDescribe the cardiac cycleExplain the structure of arteries, veins, and capillaries, and how blood flows through the body

This text been designed for an undergraduate human anatomy and physiology course at a medium sized public university. This text has been modified from the original OpenStax text to encourage more active reading for an early undergraduate student taking the first semester of a year-long human anatomy and physiology course sequence. This text has been targeted to our student population, consisting primarily of first semester pre-nursing and kinesiology majors at a university with a high proportion of first generation and PELL-eligible students who benefit from lower barriers to entry into the field. Therefore, freely-available and differently presented text can be beneficial to this student population. This version was designed with the intention of distributing it section by section through a learning management system. If this mode of distribution is used, connection to an assessment tool could be utilized. Systems covered include skeletal, muscular, cardiovascular, respiratory, and nervous.

As this text reorganizes and modifies an OpenStax’s Anatomy and Physiology 2e (see related resources link below), chapter numbers and chapter section numbers from the original have been preserved in this document. Material supplemented from other sources is cited within the text.

Course connections: Undergraduate courses aimed towards freshmen or sophomore, including Anatomy and Physiology, Introduction to Anatomy and Physiology, Physiology, Introduction to Physiology, Human Biology or similar with a human focus.