Inquiry into Nature in the Spirit of John Ray
As a follow-up to a class discussion of the nature and validity of historical and experimental science, I came into class yesterday and posed three questions to my students: Why were T. rex’s arms so short? Does repeated head trauma on the football field cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)?, and Why do our fingers wrinkle […]
Dinosaur eggs are surprisingly (to the non-biologist) similar in size. Even the very largest dinosaurs laid eggs that were hardly any bigger than the largest eggs found today. These are observations from the fossil record and these observation make sense biologically even though all we see are fossilized eggs. Eggs are limited in the size they attain for several reasons but one of the most important is that the embryos in the eggs must have oxygen to grow.
Many people have a perception of scientists as white-coated individuals hunched over at a lab bench performing experiments. They are doing experimental science which include the testing of hypotheses and determining which ones are supported and which should be discarded. Others scientists are imagined as collecting observational data using telescopes to describe distant planets and […]
