A lot of people don't realize that they do
science in everyday life just by seeing a
problem and figuring out they're asking the
question "why is this happening?" and then
testing it somehow and determining "okay this
is why the problem is occurring, this is what
we can do to fix it." That's the scientific
method and everybody does it. The beauty of
the scientific method is first of all we observe
the environment. And from those observations
we come up with questions. And from those
questions we come up with possible answers
to those questions, a hypothesis or hypotheses. And then we create tests to test those hypotheses to
see if they are indeed correct or not. In
order to test a hypothesis, we collect data,
analyze that data, and then come up with a
conclusion on whether or not our hypothesis
was correct or was it close or was it incorrect.
Everyday we will have things that come up
that don't work exactly right. We know how
we think it should work, but when we do our
work we look at the results and we say, "that's
not the way it happened yesterday. What happened
here?" And then we go back and we've made
extensive notes as to who did what, what time
it was done, what procedure was followed,
and we also make notes if we notice anything
that is not the same as it was the day before.
Paleontology, like any other science, has
to follow strict rigorous methods to be truly
scientific. It is possible to speculate about
things and have a lot of fun doing that but
if there is no scientific rigor in it, then
its really not a very important avenue of
thought or exercise. What I mean by scientific
rigor is that a strict hypothesis needs to
be formulated, data has to be acquired, and
then you test your hypothesis against that
data. So that's what the scientific process
is. This initial research of the problem, the
formulation of hypothesis, the testing of
the hypothesis, and gathering concluding something
out of your work. People often think we go
out and we try to find fossils to prove our
ideas and that's absolutely the wrong way
to look at it. What we do is we set up a hypothesis
and we go out and find fossils that disprove
our ideas. Hypotheses in science have to be
falsifiable. That means you set up a hypothesis
that, if you find the right piece of data,
its going to knock your whole idea down and
you have to start again from scratch. The
way science works, and paleontology as well,
is you start with an idea, you test that idea
over and over again, and if you can't overturn
it you have developed more confidence that
you're on the right track.
