Science And Social Science

Front 1

Natural Selection

Back 1

evolution or “survival of the fittest” misleading? Perhaps, because it’s not the abstractly fittest who survive, its those who are able to effectively reproduce

Front 2

ii. Non-teleological nature of evolution

Back 2

evolution is not purposeful. There is no purpose to things growing the way they did, instead mutated individuals survived particularly well. More commonly mutations go the other way and the individual is less capable of surviving. Giraffes with long necks just happened to do particularly well, so the feature “stuck.”

Front 3

a. Lamarckian

Back 3

– inheritance of characteristics are acquired in the lifetime, if you workout like Arnold, your kids will be huge meatheads too. ***FALSE

Front 4

b. Spontaneous generation

Back 4

life pops up out of nowhere when conditions are right; if you leave a bunch of dirty old rags in your barn, rats and roaches come from nowhere. ***FALSE

Front 5

c. Creationist

Back 5

basically this is catastrophism; the world came into being all at once and evolution only occurs within types. We didn’t all evolve from primordial goo. Creationism does generate some valid criticisms of evolutionary theory, such as unexplained gaps in the fossil record. More modern theories of natural selection incorporate “punctuated equilibrium” whereby an ice age causes a rapid burst of natural selection.*** FALSE

Front 6

Hisenberg uncertainty

Back 6

nothing can ever be measured accurately because by the very act of measuring a thing, you change it somehow.

court appointed prison watchdogs: prison officials hate these guys because by virtue of their being present, they change how the prison operates. Prisoners will want to show the guests the prison is the worst place on Earth

Front 7

Scientific method to empiricist/positivist:

Back 7

only things that can be replicated are scientific.
i. Popper said that a concept must be falsifiable through experiments to be scientific.
ii. The more an experiment is replicated without being falsified, the more it is taken to be scientifically reliable.
iii. Empiricists like Boyle’s law because it’s falsifiable through testing.

Front 8

Rationalist on science

Back 8

a concept or theory is the key ingredient and you can deduce relationships from others by just thinking about them.
i. Isaac Newton did this with his laws of motion.
ii. You just observe, think about it for a while and come up with a theory

Front 9

Quantitative theorist on science

Back 9

unless you can get numbers and derive a formula, then you don’t truly understand it

Front 10

iii. A biological taxonomist (someone who classifies animals) – is this really science?

Back 10

A rationalist would probably say yes, but an empiricist might disagree.

Front 11

iv. Consider the example of tachyons

Back 11

under Daubert, Albert Einstein could probably not testify about them because there is no way to falsify the theory. The Supreme Court has placed particular importance on the falsifiability of expert’s hypotheses.

Front 12

v. Occam’s razor

Back 12

: provided two theories describe a thing equally well, the theory with the least elements (Crump says “least moving parts”) will be preferred.

Front 13

vi. How bad can a model be and remain useful?

Back 13

Provided it conveys something to somebody and we know what its flaws are, a model can still be useful.

Front 14

vii. Ptolemaic universe versus Capernican universe – are they scientific?

Back 14

Arguably so, even if one of them is demonstrably false.

Front 15

Good scintific model

Back 15

Tractability (communicate to others/ used to make computations)
Simplicity (Occam's razor - favors least complex possible
Validity (emprical validty (testing/ demacartion: how can we tell when it does/doesnt apply)