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On the Origin of Species

by Charles Darwin

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The items in this Table of Contents are divided into categories, but there is a lot of overlap in some cases. For this reason, a few articles may be listed in two or more areas.

What Is Science?

Many people would say science is knowledge. It is not! Rather, science is a formalized and tested method of generating knowledge about nature. Knowledge generated by the scientific method may be referred to as scientific information. Knowledge gained in any other way is not scientific in any sense, and probably not knowledge either.

Here's what the National Academy of Sciences has to say about science:

In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring
phenomena. Natural causes are, in principle, reproducible and
therefore can be checked independently by others. If explanations are
based on purported forces that are outside of nature, scientists have
no way of either confirming or disproving those explanations. Any
scientific explanation has to be testable -- there must be possible
observational consequences that could support the idea but also ones
that could refute it. (National Academy of Sciences: Science,
Evolution, and Creationism, 2007, The National Academies Press, page 10.)

A little sarcastically, some people accuse scientifically oriented people of thinking they "know everything" or "have all the answers." If this were true, there would be no further need for science.

Science is a way of learning about ourselves and the world and universe around us. Nature, in other words. It is a reasonable, mostly common-sense process. It is not -- and will never be -- an end point, because we will never "know it all."

This article is not mainly about the results of science. It is about how science works. What makes science science? What is the scientific method?

Exactly What Is Science?

James "The Amazing" Randi
"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence."

T. H. Huxley
"Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense."

William Bragg
"The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them."

Mark Moldwin, Skeptical Enquirer, March/April 2005
"A fundamental characteristic of science – which separates science from pseudo-science – is that scientists welcome testing of their results against reality."

All the descriptions of science quoted above are correct, but incomplete. Science involves all these principles and more. As the University of California at Berkeley website says, "Science is a particular way of understanding the natural world. It extends the intrinsic curiosity with which we are born." http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/nature/index.shtml.

The methodology has been formalized because it has proven itself to work. And because it permits one scientist or team of scientists to understand what and how another scientist or team of scientists has done their research. This makes it easier for various groups of scientists to do the same experiments in the same way to verify each others' results. (Reproducibility is one of the main principles of the scientific method.)

The purpose of science is to learn what works and appears to be correct about ourselves, our world, and the universe, while gradually discarding that which doesn't work or appears not to be correct.

It's based on the idea that nature is orderly and predictable, and this has proved to be true in nearly all situations. Probably all, if we just understood them better. Based on this, we can observe how things happen and then generalize about what is likely to happen under similar circumstances in the future.

Admittedly, there are situations where we cannot yet make such predictions accurately. These mostly involve very tiny things like atoms, electrons, and photons (particles of light). Even in these situations, we are learning to make very accurate statistical predictions. That is, we cannot say that a particular electron is in a certain exact place at a certain exact time and traveling at a certain exact direction and speed. But we can say there is a particular probability about all these things. In this sense, we still have an underlying order in the sub-atomic world that we can use to make predictions.

Why Should We Be Concerned About Science?

"Science is a way for us not to fool ourselves." –Richard Feynman

"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." –Carl Sagan

"Science is not this dead thing. It’s happening all around us." –Ashley Mulroy, high school science student

"I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know. I believe that the truth is out there. But how can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science." – Michael Shermer

"Science, the only possible saviour of mankind, …" -- Robert Green Ingersoll

"It is absolutely imperative that our democratic citizenry, to guide public policy with respect to the implementation of science, understands basic science." – Bing McGhandi, Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes, 8/5/09, http://hjhop.blogspot.com/2009/08/evolutionists-review-of-creationists.html

As one very simple example of the predictability of nature, we can observe the sun "coming up" every morning. Based on this observation, we can predict that it is likely to "come up" again tomorrow. With additional observations using telescopes and other instruments, we eventually realize the sun does not really come up at all. Instead, the earth rotates and produces the illusion that the sun comes up. Then we correct our prediction to say the earth is likely to keep on rotating and we'll keep on seeing the sun as it appears to come up every day. This kind of observation, prediction, and correction is the very heart of science.

What we think we know is always only an approximation of reality. Therefore, we keep on and on, always trying to learn more accurately what reality is and how it works.

One of the best examples of this is when Newton's very accurate "Laws of Motion" were improved upon by Einstein. Newton wasn't "wrong." His work was extremely accurate as far as it went; but not perfect or complete. After all, what do we expect? Newton was a mental giant, but he was still human!

Two more centuries of observing, thinking, and experimenting by many scientists were necessary before Einstein was able to describe a more complete theory. Now, for almost another hundred years, physicists have been working 24/7 to improve on Einstein's work. And they will. In many ways, they already have.

Parts of this "scientific method" (like observation and simple predictions) have been known and used since before people even appeared on earth. When your cat chases a mouse, it observes what the mouse does and predicts what it is going to do next. Or where it went. These simple and obvious things are the rudiments of the scientific method.

You probably know (or have known) people who traveled in covered wagons a century ago and who were still living to watch astronauts walk on the moon. I have known such people.

It was science that literally took us from the horse and buggy to the moon in a single human lifetime.

This page was last updated 08/21/09 06:14 PM.

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