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Human Heredity 11th Edition by Michael Cummings
Edition 11ISBN: 978-1305251052Human Heredity 11th Edition by Michael Cummings
Edition 11ISBN: 978-1305251052 Exercise 12
Ockham's Razor
When Mendel proposed the simplest explanation for the number of factors contained in the F1 plants in his monohybrid crosses, he was using a well-established principle of scientific reasoning known as parsimony, or Ockham's razor.
William of Ockham (also spelled Occam) was a Franciscan monk and scholastic philosopher who lived from about 1300 to 1349. He had a strong interest in the study of thought processes and logical methods. He is the author of the maxim known as Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates from the Latin as "Entities must not be multiplied without necessity." This was taken to mean that when constructing an argument, you should use the smallest number of steps possible. In other words, never go beyond the simplest argument. Although Ockham was not the first to use this approach, he employed this tool of logic so well and so often to dissect the arguments of his opponents that it became known as Ockham's razor.
The principle was transferred from philosophy to science in the fifteenth century. Galileo used the principle of parsimony to argue that because his model of the solar system was the simplest, it was probably correct (he was right). In modern terms, the phrase is used as a rule of thumb to mean that in proposing a scientific mechanism or hypothesis, we should use the smallest number of steps possible. The simplest mechanism is not necessarily correct, but it is usually the easiest to disprove by doing experiments and the most likely to produce scientific progress.
For a given trait, Mendel concluded that both parents contribute an equal number of genes to the offspring. In this case, the simplest assumption is that each parent contributed one gene and that the F1 offspring contained two copies of that gene. Further experiments proved this conclusion correct.
Why do scientists design experiments to disprove the hypothesis they are testing instead of trying to prove that the hypothesis is correct?
When Mendel proposed the simplest explanation for the number of factors contained in the F1 plants in his monohybrid crosses, he was using a well-established principle of scientific reasoning known as parsimony, or Ockham's razor.
William of Ockham (also spelled Occam) was a Franciscan monk and scholastic philosopher who lived from about 1300 to 1349. He had a strong interest in the study of thought processes and logical methods. He is the author of the maxim known as Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates from the Latin as "Entities must not be multiplied without necessity." This was taken to mean that when constructing an argument, you should use the smallest number of steps possible. In other words, never go beyond the simplest argument. Although Ockham was not the first to use this approach, he employed this tool of logic so well and so often to dissect the arguments of his opponents that it became known as Ockham's razor.
The principle was transferred from philosophy to science in the fifteenth century. Galileo used the principle of parsimony to argue that because his model of the solar system was the simplest, it was probably correct (he was right). In modern terms, the phrase is used as a rule of thumb to mean that in proposing a scientific mechanism or hypothesis, we should use the smallest number of steps possible. The simplest mechanism is not necessarily correct, but it is usually the easiest to disprove by doing experiments and the most likely to produce scientific progress.
For a given trait, Mendel concluded that both parents contribute an equal number of genes to the offspring. In this case, the simplest assumption is that each parent contributed one gene and that the F1 offspring contained two copies of that gene. Further experiments proved this conclusion correct.
Why do scientists design experiments to disprove the hypothesis they are testing instead of trying to prove that the hypothesis is correct?
Explanation
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Human Heredity 11th Edition by Michael Cummings
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