PSYC 2054 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Earth Science, Inductive Reasoning, Imrad
24 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
Biology is the study of living organisms and their interactions with one another and their environments. There is a broad scope to biology from a microscopic to a global scale. Fields of science related to the physical world and its phenomena and processes. Hard sciences use of quantatitve data; social sciences study society and human behavior are more likely to use qualitative data: scientific reasoning. Inductive reasoning: related observations lead to general conclusions. Deductive reasoning: general principles/laws to forecast specific results. The scientific method: observation that leads to a question, propose a hypothesis (if then structure, testing a hypothesis: it should be falsifiable, meaning it can be disproven by experimental results, variables & control groups, there is flexibility. Themes and concepts of biology: what is life. All living organisms share key characteristics of functions: order, sensitivity or response to environment, reproduction, adaptation, growth and development, regulation, homeostasis, energy processing, and evolution. Even single cell organisms are very complex.
