1.3 The Community Of Science

Question: a formal review of an unpublished report by other scientists who specialize in the topic.

Answer: peer review

Question: a broad explanation that applies to a wide range of situations and observations and that is supported by several lines of evidence and broadly accepted by the scientific community.

Answer: theory

Question: a branch of philosophy that involves the study of good and bad, and of right and wrong; a set of moral principles or values held by a person or society.

Answer: ethics

Question: the application of ethnical standards to relationship between humans and their environment.

Answer: environmental ethics

Question: how does peer review benefit the scientific community?

Answer: it guards against fault science contaminating the literature on which all scientists rely.

Question: what happens to a scientific article that is rejected by a panel of other scientists?

Answer: scientific journals will refuse to publish it.

Question: why is the replication of results important?

Answer: a hypothesis must be tested repeatedly and those tests must produce the same results before the scientific community will accept the hypothesis.

Question: explain the following statement: “science is self-correcting.”

Answer: it means that science is a process that refines and improves itself over time.

Question: give an example of a self-correction in science.

Answer: in the 16th century, when Copernicus demonstrated that Earth is not at the center of the universe, scientists abandoned their strongly held scientific belief and accepted Copernicus’s findings.

Question: what is the difference between a hypothesis and a theory?

Answer: a hypothesis explains a fairly narrow set of phenomena; a theory is a broader explanation that applies to a wider range of situations and observations.