[Vaudeville music]

I want us
to discuss the-the basic
understanding
of how we do science,
how-how did science,
uh, originate, um,
what brought us to the moment
of applying science
in a way that we
can ask very complicated
but very meaningful questions
about the history of life,
evolutionary biology,
and how the earth came to be.
So to do that
[clears throat]
let's encapsulate that
in, um, in a-a discourse about
the nature of science,
what-what does science, uh, provide for us
and-and how did
science come to be?
Now, again, this is not
a philosophy course.
There are courses that will go
into great detail about this,
but, um, a short encapsulation,
I believe,
is very important for us
to understand [clears throat]
how we use the con-the basic
concepts throughout the class.
So [clears throat]
one of the things that
I think we should start with is,
uh, the idea of
critical free thought.
Now, there's many parts
of our society, um,
that critical free
thought thrives,
and its' actually
the underpinning.
Um, there's other parts
of o-our society
that does everything
possible to stop
critical free thought,
and this is not a new thing.
Actually, society
used to, uh, squash
and try to destroy all forms
of critical free thought.
So let's start with society
several thousands years ago,
and then we're gonna
come up to the modern day.
So one of the great heroes
of scientific endeavor
is Socrates,
and Socrates, uh, lived from
about 470 BC to 399 BC,
and um, he lived in the time
period, uh, in ancient Greece
where, um, society
was very hierarchical,
and that's truly what
Socrates did for us.
It-Socrates brought the idea-
I-I describe it as,
um, society at that time in many ways was kind of a-a dark void
within a large balloon,
and Socrates came
and brought a pinhole,
pricked the balloon
and brought a small pinhole
of light into a dark morass,
and that dark morass
was that society
would tell people what to do
and that was the end of the story because it was truth.
Socrates brought to the table
the idea that, well,
let's employ
critical free thought,
let's use our mind,
let's use our reason,
let's use our senses
and let's discuss this, and
that discussion process
of-of using those techniques
and then having
an open free discourse,
he called that
the dialectical method,
and that Socratic dialectical method [clears throat]
is the idea that
you freely, critically
evaluate and challenge,
and you even go
to one more step,
where the instructor
or the professor
or the politician or whoever is, um, ah, guiding the discussion
takes the attitude
of a devil's advocate.
In other words, taking a stance
that that person may
or may not believe in,
but using it
as a leveraging tool
to draw out
from the participants
what they really think
and what their
evidence is for that.
[clears throat]
So [clears throat] the,
uh, the Socratic method,
uh, w-was critical,
but what's, I think,
e-especially, uh, sobering
is that the Socratic method
was the step forward
towards accuracy and truth,
but it was also, um, the
death sentence for Socrates,
because, uh, eventually society
responded very negatively
to this,
and, um, society
not only was unhappy,
but they put Socrates to death;
they put him in prison
and they forced him
to drink, uh, hemlock.
Now, one of Socrates'
students, Aristotle,
um, ended up being one of the first true paleontologists
who thought
about evolutionary biology.
Now, it wasn't couched
in those terms, but,
um, Aristotle
[clears throat]
did a lot of hiking in
the mountains throughout Greece,
and when he was high
up in the mountains
he thought about
and wrote about
the idea that he saw
fossils in rock
that were lifted
out of the ocean,
and he saw those fossils lived
in the marine environment,
and he deduced from that
that those rocks
must have formed in the ocean
and then uplifted
by some kind of force.
Um, he also saw that
in those rocks, um,
the fossils that are
at the base of the rock,
corals and brachiopods and
clams and snails, they changed
from the bottom of the rock
to the top of the rock,
and he further
deduced that, um,
there must be a-a history
of evolutionary biology change.
Um, again, he didn't use these
words, but he-he observed that.
So-so our first true
paleontologist/evolutionary biologist was Aristotle,
and then we've had a-a
little bit of time, uh,
in human history
to move forward from that.
Now
[clears throat]
some of the questions
that Aristotle
would want us
to bring to the table
for studying evolutionary biology are things are:
What is your main point?
Um, can you give me
a good example
of what you're talking about?
Can you summarize for me
what you just discussed?
Um, what are you assuming?
Um, what kinds of-of ideas
do you know, but not know,
and then what are you assuming
might be possible to, uh,
support your assumption?
What evidence do you have?
That's always a good one, right?
What real evidence do you have
versus some kind of an
emotional knee-jerk response
to something
you feel strongly about?
Um, you know, we as humans
are always trying
to decipher those things,
and-and really culling out
true cold and hard fast evidence
from emotion or from, um,
assumption is
really, really good.
Um, and then other things
like what can you
generalize from this,
and-and how can you
make predictions,
because fundamentally
science has to be
reproducible and predictable,
and if it doesn't fulfil both
those, then it's really not, uh,
rigorous or useful science.
Um
[clears throat]
later on in history, um,
people took these ideas
and they-they-they
changed the wording a bit,
and the wording's
a little bit complicated,
but it's important, I think,
to put on the table right now.
The-the phrase is
"analogy identifies anomaly."
So the concept of analogy
is that we as humans
have an experiential base
that we bring to anything
that we-we-we are part of,
and if we see something new
[clears throat]
the first thing we do
is compare it
to something else
we've seen or experienced,
so that's the analogy.
Now, in that experience,
if we see something that
we-if-if-if through analogy
from our experiences we see
something that doesn't fit-
it's something new, it's
something unexplained-um,
then it's something that rises
as something that's, uh,
maybe concerning or
startling or interesting,
and something that
should be identified
as a topic
of further investigation.
So that's anomaly.
So "analogy identifies anomaly"
is a really important
toolkit we have.
The next person we
want to look at-
and again, this is
a whirlwind tour;
there's many others we
can bring into play,
but it's Ren Descartes,
and uh, he lived in, uh,
1596 to 1650 in France.
He was a-a-a
true renaissance man,
a philosopher,
mathematician, writer,
but he-he wrote a book
in 1637, uh,
on the Discourse on the Method,
and in other words,
what Descartes did was
to bring the concepts
of Socrates
to the next level and say
"If we have
critical free thought
"and we use our multiple senses,
"um, in everything that
we do in our everyday life,
"then we can acquire knowledge
"and have a genuine foundation
of what's going on,"
but it also, um,
it's encapsulated
in this great statement of
"I think, therefore I am."
And so the-the-he gave an
example called the wax model,
and I think that
kind of explains
where Descartes was bringing us.
Um, the wax model's
the following:
if you have
a-a candle that's cool,
with a wick in the middle,
let's say that
some candle maker just made it,
and you set the candle,
uh, in a candle holder
in front of you on the table
and you describe it,
you say "Oh, well
it has a certain temperature,
it has a color,
it has a waxiness,
it has a beautiful white wick,
um, it has
all these characteristics,"
but then if you-if you,
uh, light the candle
and allow the-the candle
to burn all the way down,
um, you-you end up with
something that's very different
than what you started with,
but it's still a candle, right?
And so let's say
that you let the candle
burn all the way down,
and you have this
molten, gooey mass.
Uh, the wick is now-
if there's any wick left, it's
black and it's, uh, carbon,
and it doesn't have
the same color,
it has none of the same shapes,
but it's still is a candle.
So therefore, um, the idea there
is that we must utilize
our multiple senses
simultaneously all the time,
but at those moments then we have to understand the context
of our observations.
Another really important
philosopher,
and again, we're jumping
through time here dramatically,
uh, is Tom Kuhn.
Uh, he lived from 1922 to 1996,
and um, uh,
Professor Kuhn was um, uh,
at Harvard and
Berkeley and MIT
and did a lot
of very influential philosophical writings
about science,
but his most important
and-and, uh,
I think profound work was
the Structure
of Scientific Revolutions,
which he published 1962.
And so this builds upon what
we've been talking about so far,
but it adds
another important caveat,
and that is that
the nature of humanity,
you know,
if scientists are humans
and we bring to the table
all the baggage
that's-that humans all have,
um, one of the natures
of science
is that it's done by humans,
and therefore, uh, change
is almost universally resisted,
and so what Kuhn,
um, puts forward
is a look at the historical development of science
and saying that, um,
some of the most important
things we've ever had, uh,
developed scientifically
was a result of
a lot of pain,
a lot of struggle and a lot
of rejection by society,
and so the scientific revolutions he talks about
is the idea that
people will methodically,
um, do scientific method
or scientific inquiry,
um, conduct research,
have hypotheses tested,
move forward with data,
synthesize it,
try to make predictions,
try to put this
into process models,
but oftentimes the most important developments
of this process is, uh,
actually rejected
by, uh, not only society
but other scientists.
And then eventually,
if the scientific work
that's being rejected or
shunned at some level,
um, if it's strong,
solid science
and-and based in
reproduct-uh,
reproducibility and prediction,
um, it-it finally prevails.