Socratic method vs. lecture method

@firmament2x “Science states that a hypothesis is either right or wrong; it yields a discrete, binary, outcome: either it will be provable by repeatable experiments yielding the same result, or it will be proven false because they don’t.”

Kinda-sorta. That is what Karl Popper claimed, but it isn’t that clean. First, it is almost impossible to prove that a scientific hypothesis is “right”. You either add evidence that supports it, or you find evidence that refutes it. However, even this is inaccurate.

Most scientific hypotheses are not simple statements, they are complex ideas, while most experiments and studies deal only with some part of the hypothesis. So a few negative results usually mean that a hypothesis needs to be tweaked or modified, not tossed out.

So Darwin’s hypothesis of decent with modification by means of natural selection was modified in light of Mendelian genetics, and is being further modified as more is learned about genetics, the connections between genotypes and phenotypes, and the forces that affect these.