Natural Behavior. Burton A. Weiss
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fearful of persecution, hid his papers for posthumous publication. Bruno (1548–1600 C.E.) studied Copernican principles and unwisely espoused these ideas in public, for which act he was burned. Galileo was tried in Italy for heresy, forced to recant, and incarcerated for life in 1633 C.E. He was forbidden from writing further and all of his works were burned. But, Galileo’s ideas had already spread beyond Italy.
So strongly held was the egocentric position that even seemingly remote challenges were met with severe sanctions. Thus, Servetus (Miguel Serveto, 1511–1553 C.E.) was burned by John Calvin for describing blood circulation as being pumped by the heart. The prevailing view was that blood ebbed and flowed like the tides as Aristotle had stated. People of the era thought the heart was the seat of the soul and conceived of health and personality as based on the balance of body fluids. We still retain many heart references for emotions. Two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin was also widely condemned by clergy for investigating such “heavenly” phenomena as lightning. That reaction to scientific exploration influenced the separation of church and state clause in the American Constitution, which Franklin helped compose. The framers of the Constitution were determined to prevent clergy from destroying people for having new ideas. Yet, the myth of devout founding fathers is still promulgated despite contrary evidence. For example, Washington opened his successful attack on Trenton and subsequently Princeton on Christmas. Had Washington been devout and not launched his campaign on Christmas, he would not have had the element of surprise necessary to defeat the better armed and trained opposition. Thus, the Colonies would have remained British. Washington would not likely have been surprised by an attack on Sunday morning like that at Pearl Harbor.
Darwin, in explaining the origin of species, challenged the extremely critical egocentric view of humanity as a direct, divine creation. Attacks on those teaching evolution are rampant and frequent even today, over a century and a half after Darwin’s initial publication. Darwin’s ideas will be considered in later text.
Einstein’s contribution to the trend away from the egocentric position was contained in his principles of relativity. Relativity challenged many concepts of absolutes in the universe. Some clergy still confuse the physical principle of relativity with the unrelated philosophical and theological position of relativism, which depicts morality as relative. Thus, opposition to the supposed concepts of relativity has grown because of lack of understanding.
Freud, in turn, demolished the egocentric view of human rationality. After Freud’s pioneering techniques of psychoanalysis have been superseded, Freud’s demonstration of the non-rational foundation of human behavior will persist as a milestone in the trend away from the egocentric view of people.
The Nature of Science
Since such a major trend in human thought has been led by science, it is cogent to question the nature of science. Also, needing questioning is how the move away from the egocentric view could be pushed against very strong resistance to new ideas. Frequently, science is linked with a lengthy history of inquiry. Certainly, the older sciences like physics and astronomy have such a history of inquiry. However, many younger sciences barely have any history of inquiry, and a new science starting tomorrow would have none. In addition, disciplines clearly not sciences, such as art and music, have a history of inquiry into their own aesthetic analysis of the worlds with which they deal. An artist or musician usually must master the history of the subject before generating original work. Therefore, a history of inquiry is not what distinguishes a science from other types of endeavor.
Sciences typically acquire a body of facts and laws. The presence of a body of facts and laws is, therefore, sometimes used to identify a science. The same objection to this differentiation of science can be raised as was for the history of inquiry definition. Namely, new or young sciences do not have bodies of facts and laws, and non-scientific disciplines such as art and music do have bodies of facts and laws. An artist or musician typically masters the facts and laws of the subject before creating original work. In a portrait, for example, the eyes are half way down the head. Further analysis of the apparently cohesive body of facts and laws of even the older sciences shows some basic flaws.
Light, for example, has been a subject of study for a long time in the science of physics. Light is defined in the psychological, not physical, terms of electromagnetic energy stimulating the human retina resulting in vision. Related energy, like infrared or ultra-violet, are not visible to humans and do not count as light. Light is also treated on at least three levels, each with distinct mathematical analyses with separate understanding. Physicists deal with light as a ray or beam with geometrical optics for the topics of reflection, refraction, and similar phenomena. Light is also considered as a wave with sinusoidal analysis for interference, diffraction, and related occurrences. Finally, light is viewed as a packet, or photon, with statistical quantum analysis for phenomena like absorption and emission of light energy and comparable events. The cohesion of this body of facts and laws is only apparent. Thus, the attempt to differentiate a science from other disciplines by any accumulated body of facts and laws must be discarded and, the question of the nature of science remains.
Sciences always deal with specific observations of events in the world and with general hypotheses about the observations. But, so also, do many non-scientific disciplines like art and music. Scientists, however, have very definite ways of developing hypotheses from observations by the method of inductive logic and, in turn, of checking hypotheses against observations by the method of deductive logic. These methods of inducing hypotheses from observations of events, and deducing observations that should follow from hypotheses are the signatures of all sciences. Science is the scientific method. Knowledge is generated by the use of the scientific method. Figure 1-1 graphically depicts the scientific method of progressively cycling from observations to hypotheses to observations, etc. The cycling may be started anywhere depending on the particular subject and the abilities of the scientists involved.
Figure 1-1 The Scientific Method of generating knowledge by employing inductive logic to generate hypotheses from observations and deductive logic to check the accuracy of hypotheses against observations.
Some sciences emphasize the deductive side of the cycle. Physics articles are generally published in the deductive form of stating a particular hypothesis, then describing an experiment which generated observations bearing on the accuracy of the hypothesis. Other sciences emphasize the inductive portion of the cycle. Astronomy depends heavily on careful observations to generate hypotheses about the stellar universe. However, all sciences employ the cyclic method, and any instance of the method being employed is science.
Underlying the use of the scientific method is one basic assumption, scientific determinism. Scientific determinism is the assumption that events in the universe are predisposed toward lawful behavior. Without the assumption, science is reduced to dealing with unique occurrences unrelated in time or space. What is discovered in one place is not necessarily true in another location. What is valid now may not have been yesterday and is uncertain tomorrow. With the assumption of scientific determinism, science studies continuing processes of events in the universe.
Scientific determinism is not the same as determinism, the philosophical idea of predestination or fatalism. The assumption of scientific determinism, that events in the universe are lawful, does not require such restrictive conditions. The only stipulation is that, all of many possible outcomes of an event are each in themselves lawful, even if at times unpredictable. Examples of lawful but unpredictable events are rolling dice, and the radioactive decay of atoms.
Dice tossing, tabulated in Table 1-1, represents the principle of scientific determinism, because all the possibilities are lawful, but not predestined. Thus, a score of seven has six possible ways to occur (five plus two, two plus five, three plus four, four plus three, six plus one, and one plus six) out of 36. The probability of a seven occurring is six in 36 or once in every six tosses. In a population of 36,000 tosses there will be 6000 sevens with very little error, and much less than a percent variation. However, if on any single toss, anyone wishes to know whether a seven will appear, only the estimate