1 The Nature of Science
What Is Science?
The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
—Thomas H. HuxleyThere are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly alright;
they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.
To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and
scrutiny.
—Carl SaganBefore we discuss evolution and the fossil record in detail, we must clear up a number
of misconceptions about what science is—and isn’t. Many people get their image of science
from Hollywood stereotypes of the “mad scientist,” fiendishly plotting some diabolical cre-
ation with a room full of bubbling beakers and sparking electrical apparatuses. Invariably,
the plot concludes with some sort of “Frankenstein” message that it’s not nice for science
to mess with Mother Nature. Even the positive stereotypes are not much better, with nerdy
characters like Jimmy Neutron and Poindexter (always wearing glasses and the obligatory
white lab coat) using the same bubbling beakers and sparking equipment but trying to
invent something new or good.
In reality, scientists are just people like you and me. Most of us don’t wear lab coats
(I don’t) or work with bubbling beakers or sparking Van de Graaff generators (unless they
are chemists or physicists who actually work with that equipment). Most scientists are not
geniuses either. It is true that, on average, scientists tend to be better educated than the typi-
cal person on the street, but that education is a necessity to learn all the information that
allows a scientist to make discoveries. Still, there are geniuses, like Thomas Edison, who had
minimal formal education (he only attended school for a few months) but a natural instinct
for invention. So education is not always required if you have talent to compensate. Scien-
tists are not inherently good or evil; nor are they trying to create Frankensteins, invent the
next superweapon, or tamper with the operations of nature. Most are ordinary people who
have the interest and curiosity to solve some problem in nature, and rarely do they discover
anything that might threaten humanity.
Scientists are not characterized by who they are or what they wear, but what they do and
how they do it. As Carl Sagan put it, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a
body of knowledge.” Scientists are defined not by their lab equipment but by the tools and
assumptions they use to understand nature—the scientific method. The scientific method is
mentioned even in elementary school science classes, yet most of the public still doesn’t
understand it (possibly because the mad scientist Hollywood stereotype is more powerful
than the bland material from school). The scientific method involves making observations
about the natural world, then coming up with ideas or insights (hypotheses) to explain them.