. The art of scientific investigation. Research. CHAPTER TWO EXPERIMENTATION " The experiment serves two purposes, often independent one from the other: it allows the observation of new facts, hitherto either unsuspected, or not yet well defined; and it determines whether a working hypothesis fits the world of observable ;—Rene J. Dubos. Biological experiments SCIENCE as we know it to-day may be said to date from the introduction of the experimental method during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, important as experimentation is in most branches of science, it is not appropriate to
. The art of scientific investigation. Research. CHAPTER TWO EXPERIMENTATION " The experiment serves two purposes, often independent one from the other: it allows the observation of new facts, hitherto either unsuspected, or not yet well defined; and it determines whether a working hypothesis fits the world of observable ;—Rene J. Dubos. Biological experiments SCIENCE as we know it to-day may be said to date from the introduction of the experimental method during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, important as experimentation is in most branches of science, it is not appropriate to all types of research. It is not used, for instance, in descriptive biology, observational ecology or in most forms of clinical research in medicine. However, investigations of this latter type make use of many of the same principles. The main difference is that hypotheses are tested by the collection of information from phenomena which occur naturally instead of those that are made to take place under experimental conditions. In writing the last part of the previous chapter and the first part of this one I have had in mind the experimentalist, but there may be some points of interest in these also for the purely observational investigator. An experiment usually consists in making an event occur under known conditions where as many extraneous influences as possible are eliminated and close observation is possible so that relation- ships between phenomena can be revealed. The " controlled experiment" is one of the most important concepts in biological experimentation. In this there are two or more similar groups (identical except for the inherent vari- ability of all biological material); one, the "control" group, is held as a standard for comparison, while the other, the " test" group, is subjected to some procedure whose effect one wishes to 13. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally en
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