The Burgess Story
"I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're really not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors.
- Luis Alvarez, Physics Nobel Laureate -
Luis Alvarez evidently had some very definite ideas about what a good scientist does, and it is especially telling that such a comment comes from a physicist. What could Alvarez have had in mind when he made this remark? He may have been making a mental comparison of the approach commonly used in physics -- that of laboratory experimentation -- with the way the study of paleontology is conducted, A paleontologist is very much a historian -- someone who is involved in the "reconstruction of past events ... based on narrative evidence of their own unique phenomena" (Gould 278). In Alvarez's eyes then, good science is characterised by the experimental approach of experiment, quantification, repetition, prediction, and restriction of complexity to a few variables that can be controlled and manipulated" (Gould 277). This seems to me too narrow a definition. Such an approach can hardly be used in fields such as paleontology, which study the occurrence of one-off events such as evolution. In cases such as these, what standards can we use to determine whether something is admissible as good scientific practice? Philosophers of science such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn have each come up with their own ideas of what constitutes good science. Can they perhaps shed some light on other possible definitions of good science? Can these other definitions of good science be generalised to all disciplines of science?
Popper and Kuhn have proposed strictly theoretical ideas -- It remains to be seen whether a concrete example of scientific resear...
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...se pressures? The critenia for good science is jmportant so that the scientist remembers not to cave in to these pressures, and the layperson remembers that scientists can be fallible.
Works Cited
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The white women in Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The older sister in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire both struggle mentally with reality and fantasy. Ella Downey, a desperately unstable, racially aware woman, struggles to overcome her insecurities, and is mentally torn between reality and fantasy. Like Ella, Blanche Dubois, a disillusioned woman, finds herself struggling mentally; unable to overcome reality, refuses to accept things are what they are, retreats to the fantasies of her mind.
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Cooper, Lawrence, Cary Murphy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Chicago: Taylor & Francis, 1996
Animal experimentation has many ways that they test new drugs or new products on animals. For example, “LD50, forced - fed, forced to breed poison or toxic, and eat poisonous products to find out” what will happen to them (Park 13). Some animals will die quickly while others will take some time, in that period of time they will suffer since there insides are being discomposed. Animal testing is a place where animal bodies are being tortured in the most notorious ways.
Are most American teenagers expecting to marry Asian women? We are familiar with definitions such as: Afro- American, Hispano American, but is Asian American the new substitute for the new white race?
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Then in 1962, Kuhn’s revolutionary book challenged the prevailing model of the history of science and argued for an episodic structure in which periods of conceptual continuity in normal science are interrupted by periods of revolutionary science.
Over the last ten years people in the United State and around the world have heavily relied more on their debit or credit cards to process transactions of their purchases. In the old days it used to be when you would get your paycheck on Friday and rush to the bank during your break or lunch in order to cash withdraw your funds or deposit them into your account. It used to be where you carry cash to buy groceries, pay bills, and go shopping. Now some people don’t even set foot inside their bank branch because they are paid using direct deposit or the funds are loaded into a debit card provided by their employer. Many employers from around the globe don’t even issue paper check anymore. Bills are often times paid online, babysitters are accepting electronic payment such as PayPal and even food trucks now take electronic payments. According to a Washington Post column by Michelle Singletary society and businesses embrace using cashless ways to pay for things than the old time traditional “cold hard cash”. In my opinion there should still be cash circulating out in the world. My first ...
Charlesworth, M. (1982). Science, non-science & pseudo-science : Bacon, Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend on defining science. Vic: Deakin University Press
The use of credit and debit cards today are taking a tour in the sense that electronic cash is becoming more admissible as the world makes a switch towar...
Routledge, R. (1881). A popular history of science. (pp. 553-554).G. Routledge and Sons. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=VO1HAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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