High School Biology/Nature of Science

Science’s main goal is to figure out the way the world works through the scientific method. This method in fact guides most scientific research. It isn’t alone though, experimentation, and an experiment is a test that is used to eliminate one or more of the possible hypotheses, asking questions, and making observations also guide scientific research. It is also good practice to rely on evidence before making conclusions and to be skeptical about ideas or results. The supernatural is left out of science in general, and if something had previously had a supernatural explanation, scientists have found out the reason for the phenomena, and phenomena are any occurrence that is observable. A good example of this is “The Will o’ the Wisp,” but this video is not going to cover that subject. Scientists must be open to change, willing to avoid trying to answer all questions, and skeptical.

Scientists view the world with a skeptical attitude. This is either called scientific skepticism or skeptical inquiry, and it includes an attitude of questioning claims based on their scientific verifiability rather than accepting claims based on faith or anecdote. They avoid giving supernatural reasons for the phenomena they witness, and realize that the world runs on the rules set in place by what science has discovered up to this point through the use of the scientific method.

Most uses of the scientific method, which is based on gathering observable, empirical, and measurable evidence that is critically evaluated, start when a scientist makes an observation, which is the act of noting or detecting phenomena through the senses, that intrigues them, and this observation causes them to start thinking of a question they have about this world. After that question is in their mind, they develop a few potential hypotheses to give an answer to their question. They then experiment with certain factors related to their hypotheses and are able to eliminate some. This is most likely going to consist of controlled experiments, but natural experiments are sometimes used in cases where it is impossible to have a control group. They may eliminate all of them, but if they keep testing, their experiments will end up giving a hypothesis more credibility than it previously had. After they have a single possible hypothesis, a scientist may expand on it by making further predictions, and these predictions should be both precise (or consistent) and accurate (or close to the truth). They come up with an experiment to test those predictions that are related to their hypothesis, and if multiple experiments confirm these predictions, that hypothesis has the ability to become a theory, but if they don’t, it’s back to the drawing board for the scientist, and his experiments.

In an experiment, it is important to have a control group, one that has had no changes made to it, in order to see if your results are caused by your experiment, or if they are simply observations that you could’ve made without the experiment. It gives the scientist a sort of “normality” to compare their tests to in relation to the hypothesis.

Any good hypothesis is one that allows for predictions to be made based on reasoning. It could be deductive reasoning, which involves determining a single fact from a general statement, but in the scientific community, it mostly seems to be inductive reasoning, which involves determining a general statement that is very likely to be true, from several facts, based on the effects caused by the independent variable in multiple experiments.

In an experiment there is a variable called the independent variable, and it is the variable that is changed by the scientist. It is the one thing in an experiment that a scientist changes in order to observe the effect on the dependent variable compared to the control group, allowing the hypothesis to either be confirmed or denied.

There is much confusion over what the word theory means in the scientific world. People equate it with hypothesis, and while it is a form of hypothesis, it has much more support, and is generally accepted as fact by scientists. A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested to the point where there is a small chance that it is wrong, and they often stand the test of time. This is not to say that they are always the truth, as there are some theories that have been superseded, such as Lamarck’s Theory of Evolution. A hypothesis is usually suggested based on evidence, but it usually hasn’t been tested. Though for something to be a hypothesis, it has to be able to be tested. It can’t be impossible to test. There are also scientific laws, which are taken as fact, and generally accepted as something that will never change.

All-in-all these things will be useful to know when discussing science in general, not just Biology.

From the script for the video sharing this namesake by my channel TheBeePeeper on YouTube under the CC BY license.

This material was adapted from the original CK-12 book that can be found here. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License