BSC 116 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Gametangium, Glomeromycota, Symmetry In Biology
24 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
The jobs of a scientist are to know things about the world and to explain them. Two phases of scientific research: discovery and explanation: both involve inquiry: asking questions, each phase informs the other. Pieces of information: data (plural; singular: datum: quantitative: countable, measureable, qualitative: descriptive, comparative, the same observations can be reported as either. Explanations are hypotheses (plural; singular: hypothesis: educated guess to explain a set of observations, interesting hypotheses suggest where to look for new knowledge (cyclic) Scientific knowledge is conditional: the meaning of our data changes as we get more. There are two different kinds of reasoning applied: inductive reasoning: extrapolating from observations to a generalization, deductive reasoning: use a generalization to explain particular cases. We have to be willing to replace our explanations when they are shown to be wrong . For a hypothesis to be useful, it must: provide the best explanation, it must be falsifiable = testable.
