What Constitute as Evidence?

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Recommended: Primary and secondary sources of data

What constitute as evidence? How has evidence and truth evolved/changed as society progressed? Use example(s) to illustrate how truth can be challenged as new ideas arise.

Evidence is fundamental in science. It plays a role of proofing the hypothesis. However, what can be a piece of evidence? Apart from this, some ‘truth’ or evidence that are once accepted by the world can be changed as the society progressed. Evolution of truth and evidence can be driven by various factors. In this essay, the first part will focus on what is considered as evidence in science, how the evidence and truth changed following the cycle of paradigm shift and illustrate the factors that causing the truth being challenged with different examples.

Evidence can be anything that used to prove an assertion. Evidence in science will be focused on this essay. Scientific evidences can be used to support or reject the hypothesis in science. The evidences are often found by different scientific methods. Based on various scientific methods, scientific evidence can be mainly divided into two types which are observational and experimental evidence.

Observation evidence plays an important role in science discovery. This kind of evidence is produced by the perceptual sensation like hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting, with the assistance of some instruments like microscope, telescope and stethoscope (Bogen, 2009). The most common example of using observational evidence can be Galileo used the telescope to observe the four satellites of Jupiter in 1610. This can be a piece of observational evidence in Astronomy. In medicine, observational study means the researchers obtain the evidence through observing the condition of the patient under exposur...

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...omas S. (1957). The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674171039.

Naughton, J. (2012, 19 August). Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science. Theguardian. TheObserver. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions

The Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada. (2011). Primer on Population Health. Retrieved from http://phprimer.afmc.ca/Part2-MethodsStudyingHealth/Chapter5AssessingEvidenceAndInformation/Observationalstudies

University at Albany. (2013, October). Primary and secondary source in science. Retrieved from http://library.albany.edu/usered/dr/prisci.html

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.(2012, 9 May). DDT- A Brief History and Status. Retrieved from
http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/chemicals/ddt-brief-history-status.htm

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