Scientific Process and Social Issues in Biology Education

240 Pages·2017·6.01 MB·English

by  Garland E. Allen, Jeffrey J.W. Baker (auth.)

Springer Texts in Education
Garland E. Allen
Jeffrey J.W. Baker
Scientific
Process and
Social Issues
in Biology
Education
Springer Texts in Education
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13812
Garland E. Allen Jeffrey J.W. Baker
(cid:129)
Scientific Process
and Social Issues
in Biology Education
123
Garland E. Allen Jeffrey J.W.Baker
Department ofBiology WesleyanUniversity
Washington University in St.Louis Middletown, CT
St.Louis, MO USA
USA
ISSN 2366-7672 ISSN 2366-7980 (electronic)
SpringerTexts inEducation
ISBN978-3-319-44378-2 ISBN978-3-319-44380-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44380-5
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Preface
This book is the product of the authors’ teaching introductory biology and related
science courses at several different colleges and universities, though primarily at
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (Baker) and Washington Univer-
sity, St. Louis, Missouri (Allen). One of us remembers in his earliest years of
teaching having the distinct feeling that, more often than not, some of his most
creativestudentsreceivedonlymediocregrades:unmotivatedbythepresentationof
adazzlingarrayofdetailedfactualinformation,theywouldoftenaskunexpectedly
thoughtfulandhighlyreflectivequestions.Conversely,studentsreceivingAs,while
able to regurgitate biological “facts,” (e.g., details of the Krebs citric acid cycle),
were often totally incapable of mapping out a strategy for investigating even the
simplest of research projects. A variation on this theme was the comment of one
facultycolleague that he found himself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with
the recognition that a few of his students could complete a basic introductory
biologycoursesatisfactorilyyetstillremainconvincedoftheintellectualvalidityof
Creationism!
These and other such experiences convinced us that students may do well in a
science course but fail completely to comprehend the nature of science itself, the
underlying reasons for its immense power as an intellectual process, and the rela-
tionship between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Perhaps
worse, when considering science at all, students seem to drift from one extreme to
another,eitherbuying intopopularpressversionsofscienceastheultimatesource
of all truth or viewing it as just one of many systems of intellectual thought, of no
greaterorlesservaliditythananyother.Unfortunately,thislatterviewisoneoften
found even among the ranks of college faculty in the social sciences and the
humanities,inwhichmodernsciencemaybereferredtoas“justanothersystemof
myths,” “the predominant myth of the twentieth century,” or other words to that
effect. Such a view does a profound disservice to the meaning of both the terms
“science” and “myth.” If indeed modern science is to be viewed as a myth, then
clearly it is by far the most powerful one yet devised by the human imagination!
Itwasinanattempttodealwiththisconfusionthat,overtheyears,webeganto
incorporate material into our course designed to confront this and other such
problems. Ironically, one of the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for this
v
vi Preface
bookwroteacommentthatreflectsbeautifullythesortofresistanceoneencounters
to such efforts:
Aspartofadebatewithfacultyovercurricularissuessomeyearsago,Iaskedoneofmy
colleagueshowoursciencestudentswouldfareiftheywereaskedtodistinguishbetween
scienceandthehumanities....Theresponseofmycolleaguewassilence.Thissilencewas
born of what I believe to be a pervasive fact: that those of us who teach science rarely
considered these issue so explicitly. . . . It is much easier to present the facts of normal
science(whatweknow)thantoconsiderhowweknowit.
In one of our earlier books we put forward what we think is the essence of a
processapproachtoscience:“...itistheprocess,notmerelythecontentor“facts”
ofbiology,thatshouldformthebasicthrustofintroductorycourses.Bytheprocess
of science we mean how we know what we know; how experiments are designed,
dataanalyzedandconclusionsdrawn—inshort,thelogicandmethodofscience.”1
Thisapproachisdesignedtostresstostudentsthattoday’sscientific“facts”maybe
tomorrow’s errors. In our efforts over the past few years to produce an updated
version of our approach, however, we found ourselves immersed in a publishing
world far more concerned with the commercial success of encyclopedic and
fact-driven textbooks and much less in scientific process. Beyond that, the intro-
ductionoffullcolortobothartandphotographshasdriventhecosttothestudentof
suchtextbookstoastronomicalheights,insomecases,wellover$100!Aslovelyas
these books may appear, in this day and age of widespread student access to color
TV,photographyandtheInternet,onecannothelpbutwonderifsuchanexpenseis
justifiable. Thus when the Fitzgerald Science Press originally expressed interest in
the underlying philosophy of our work and in publishing it as a series of low cost
yet high quality, two-color volumes, we felt that a genuine meeting of the minds
had occurred.
Theformatofthisbookisdesignedspecificallytoaddressthenatureofscience
in general and of the biological sciences in particular. Chapter 1 deals with the
historical development of the life sciences and looks ahead towhat the field might
be like in the next century. It also uses examples of current research in the field to
stress that biology, like all the natural sciences, has many unsolved problems
researchers today are still trying to understand and is therefore a field no less
dynamic now than in the past.
Chapter2beginswithanin-depthlook atbiologyasascienceinthecontextof
hypothesis formulationandtheunderlying inductive and deductivelogicinvolved.
Here we stress the differing types of hypotheses, the role that conscious and
unconscious bias may play in both formulating questions and evaluating answers,
as well as the strengths and limitations of science as an intellectual discipline.
Chapter 3 deals with how scientific hypotheses are tested and how the logic
involved may be analyzed in terms of its inductive and deductive framework. We
have often elected here and elsewhere in this book to use older studies from the
1Preface,TheStudyofBiology,4th,edition,Baker,JeffreyJ.W.,andAllen,GarlandE.Reading,
MA.AddisonWesleyPublishingCompany,1982,p.v.
Preface vii
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. So doing enables us to avoid
having to provide a great deal of subject matter background and, since the student
reader more than likely already knows the “answer,” he or she is forced to con-
centrate instead on the underlying intellectual structure involved. We then apply
insights from these older case studies to contemporary issues: e.g., conflicting
hypotheses concerning the cause of the AIDS epidemic now sweeping many
developed and developing nations. For those instructors interested in introducing
early the concept of statistical analysis in hypotheses evaluation, we provide an
appendix dealing with some of the essential concepts and techniques and means
used to illustrate experimentally established correlation.
Chapter 4 compares three case studies, the first an example of research carried
outinthelaboratoryandthesecondanexampleofresearchinthefield,withallthe
difficulties in terms of controlling variables that such studies entail. The third case
study deals with problems inherent in evolutionary studies in which events have
occurred that cannot be observed directly.
Finally, Chapter 5 is concerned with the interrelationship of science and the
society within which it develops and the social responsibility of scientists to the
society that funds their research. Using Creationism as our example, we end with
issuesraisedbythestillall-too-powerfulattractionofpseudoscienceanditsmisuse
tofurtheraparticularpoliticalagenda.Doubtlesshereinstructorsmaywishtobring
in other examples of their own.
It is only appropriate here that we express our gratitude for the assistance pro-
videdusbythelateIrmaMorose,TeresaL.Tate(néeLowe),andCindyMarks.All
too often such valuable input goes unrecognized, despite the fact that little or
nothing could be accomplished without it. It would be difficult to find greater
justification for this book.
St. Louis, MO, USA Garland E. Allen
Ivy, VA, USA Jeffrey J.W. Baker
March 2014
Contents
1 Biology as a Process of Inquiry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 The Growth of Biological Thought: The Nineteenth Century. . . . 2
1.3 The Twentieth Century Revolution in Biology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 The Spirit of Inquiry: Some Unsolved Problems in Biology . . . . 13
1.4.1 The Excitement of Unexpected Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.4.2 Butterfly Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.4.3 Hen’s Teeth and Evolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.4.4 The Chemical Origin of Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Further Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2 The Nature and Logic of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.2 Science as an Intellectual Discipline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3 The Logic of Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.4 The Logic of Science: Induction and Deduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.5 The “Dissection” of an Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.6 The Logic of Science: Hypotheses as Explanations . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.7 Bias in Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.8 The Concept of Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
2.9 Modern Science, Materialism and Idealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.10 Conclusion: The Strengths and Limitations of Science . . . . . . . . 77
2.11 Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Further Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3 The Nature and Logic of Science: Testing Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2 Testing Hypotheses: Some General Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2.1 Testing Hypotheses by Observation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2.2 Testing Hypotheses by Experiments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3.2.3 The Importance of Uniformity and Sample Size . . . . . . . 86
ix
x Contents
3.3 A Case Study in Hypothesis Formulation and Testing:
How Is Cholera Transmitted? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.3.1 Disease: The Early Views. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.3.2 Snow’s Observations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.3.3 An Alternative Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.3.4 The Case of the Broad Street Pump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
3.3.5 Objections to Snow’s Water-Borne Hypothesis . . . . . . . . 93
3.3.6 The Critical Test. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.3.7 A Wider Applicability and the Role of Chance. . . . . . . . 95
3.3.8 The Mechanism of Cholera Action: A Modern
Perspective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.4 A Modern-Day Epidemic: The AIDS Crisis, 1981–2000. . . . . . . 96
3.4.1 Background: The Origin of the AIDS Crisis. . . . . . . . . . 96
3.4.2 The Nature of HIV Infection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
3.4.3 Treatment and/or Cure for AIDS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
3.5.1 Questions for Critical Thinking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Further Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4 Doing Biology: Three Case Studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.2 Formulating and Testing Hypotheses in the Laboratory:
The Discovery of Nerve Growth Factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
4.3 Research in the Field: Homing in Salmon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
4.3.1 The Organism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
4.3.2 Two Possible Hypotheses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.3.3 Tabulating the Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.3.4 Further Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.3.5 Testing the Pheromone Hypothesis Further. . . . . . . . . . . 124
4.3.6 “Dissecting” the Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
4.3.7 Statistical Significance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.4 An Evolutionary Historical Case: Mass Extinctions
and the End of the Dinosaurs: The Nemesis Affair. . . . . . . . . . . 129
4.4.1 Testing the Impact Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
4.4.2 Extinctions and the Paleontological Record. . . . . . . . . . . 132
4.4.3 Periodic Mass Extinctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.4.4 The Nemesis Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Further Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
5 The Social Context of Science: The Interaction of Science
and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
5.2 Science and Technology—The Public Confusion. . . . . . . . . . . . 140
5.3 The Social Construction of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141