LIFESCI 7A Chapter 1.1: Section 1.1 The Scientific Method
Document Summary
Biology: the science of how life works. The study of cognition, behavior, biomechanics and physiology are ways to approach this. Observation: act of viewing the world around us. Experimentation: a disciplines and controlled way of asking and answering questions about the world in an unbiased manner. Observation allows us to draw tentative explanations called hypotheses. In darwin"s on the origin of species, it illustrates how putting individual observations together to construct a working hypothesis. A hypothesis makes predictions that can be tested by observation and experiments. Makes predictions about observations not yet made or experiments not yet run. Can devise an experiments to see whether the predictions made by the hypothesis actually occur. Variable: introduced to groups that"s hypothesized to have some sort of an effect. Control group: researcher does not introduce the variable. Researchers are able to determine if a variable is important by changing one variable at a time.
