This is a new edition of the winner of the 1999 award of excellence from the Text and Academic Authors Association in the college life sciences category. ASKING ABOUT LIFE, Second Edition promotes student understanding of the experimental origins of biological knowledge through a truly inquiry-based approach. This emphasis helps students learn biology by emphasizing questions, experimentation, and principles of biology. The text presents biology as a dynamic human activity, stressing the importance of questions rather than answers. Through engaging stories, clear illustrations, and verbal and visual metaphors, the authors make biology accessible and friendly, while still conveying the excitement of contemporary research. This edition was developed using the extensive research done with users and non-users of previous editions by the Market Intelligence Group.