L41 BIOL 2970 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Shocked Quartz, Falsifiability, August Weismann
2 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
2 methodological assumptions: uniformity of law: laws of chemistry and physics are constant through earth"s history, uniformity of process: use familiar geological processes to explain past events. 2 main hypotheses: gradualism: geological changes accumulate over time in small increments to produce major change, nondirectionalism: dynamic steady state of earth"s surface features. Domain of darwinism: diversity of living forms, not origin of life from nonliving matter. Cretaceous: tertiary (kt) boundary clay: 65 million years ago. Darwin"s on the origin of species - 1859. Active doubt - role of theory in science. Theory: rational explanation, based on measurable natural phenomenon. Empirical verification and power: successful prediction of precise details in data, large numbers of data collected. Chimera: fusion of fraternal twin zygotes produces a single individual who is a genetic mosaic of. Darwinism-lamarckian inheritance: eventually replacing it with mendelism and the chromosomal theory of inheritance. Potentially falsifiable: makes predictions that can potentially be refuted by data.
