Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 37

The study of evolution is the study of the change through time of the properties of a living species. That’s because evolution is the foundation of the life sciences. Many kinds of life forms have become extinct (like the dinosaurs), but each of today’s living species (including humanity) has an evolutionary ancestry that reaches far back in time. Today, physical anthropologists can investigate our ancestors to tell us a lot about our evolutionary past.

Evolution is often called a theory by people outside the scientific community, but in 2008 the scientific community at large advanced evolution to a fact status. Evolution is well demonstrated and supported by a wide variety of evidence gathered by scientists from around the world over the last 150 years. Evolution does happen.

Evolution, like anthropology, is studied by scientists. The scientific method both subjects share is a relatively simple process of generating knowledge based on three main stages of investigation. First, the scientist makes observations about the relationships among variables (such as air temperature and its effect on water). She then forms a hypothesis, or a statement about what effects she believes those variables will have on one another. (For example, she may hypothesize that exposure to cold air will cause water to freeze.) To test her hypothesis, she performs experiments to see whether her predictions are correct. If her hypothesis holds up under this extensive testing, she accepts the hypothesis as fact; if the experiments fail to produce the predicted results, she rejects the hypothesis. The key here is experimentation. What matters isn’t whether the scientist is a professor or an undergraduate but whether the data support the hypothesis. Every scientific claim is entirely open to questioning and scrutiny. Science recognizes no authorities; every statement is open to further investigation. In this way, science is the most democratic way of generating knowledge.