Jeffrey J. W. Baker

Teaching and Research: Does Research Have a Beneficial Effect on Teaching?

I was invited to write this article by the Commission on Undergraduate Education in the Biological Sciences because I am the author-editor of a CUEBS publication dealing with the relationship (if any) which exists between research participation and good teaching.I In 1967, CUEBS made available, free to the biological academic community, their publication number 19, Biology for the Non-Major. Begun originally almost as an afterthought, Biology for the NonMajor turned out to be a highly sucessful book in terms of aiding in the breaking of old institutional patterns and infusing new life into the role of biology in a general education. Briefly, the publication used as a technique the idea of writing to scientists involved in teaching and/or research, posing questions concerning the structure of a biology course designed especially for the nonmajor. Purposefully vague questions were designed so as to stimulate the respondents thinking on the topic, but not lead him in one direction or the other. The replies received were then edited into a book designed to reflect the various and varying viewpoints represented in the respondents letters.

The Nature and Logic of Science

This chapter provides the basic foundation for understanding the logic involved in scientific/biological reasoning. Topics include: inductive and deductive logic, hypothesis formulation (if … then reasoning), the concept of “proof” in science, and the difference between truth and validity. The interplay of these elements are illustrated by the “dissection” of a specific set of investigations by Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani in the eighteenth century concerning what elements of the male semen were causally involved in fertilization and embryonic development in animals. The chapter then moves to a discussion of the way in which hypotheses are formulated as different kinds of explanations in biology, such as teleological versus causal explanations, all illustrated by the question of why warblers begin to migrate south from New England in the fall. This section also examines some of the recent philosophical studies on the nature of mechanisms in biology, and what elements are necessary for a mechanism to be successful as part of a scientific explanation. After discussing the nature of cause-and-effect in biology, and how causal relationships can be distinguished from simply correlations or accidental coincidences, the nature of bias in science is introduced to emphasize that science cannot eliminate all bias, and indeed that sometimes biases (or points of view) are extremely fruitful. The final part of the chapter is devoted to philosophical issues in biology: the nature of paradigms and paradigm shifts in biology, the materialist (as opposed to idealist) foundations of modern biology, and a review of both the strengths and weaknesses of science.

Biology as a Process of Inquiry

This chapter provides an overview of the nature of process in science, and biology in particular, with an emphasis on the fact that science is always an ongoing exploration of unsolved problems. After tracing the history of debates about the role of various methods and approaches to biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chapter proceeds to a discussion of a major revolution in biology during the twentieth century, with the introduction of new approaches associated with molecular and cell biology, and molecular genetics. The chapter concludes with three case studies of still-unsolved problems in biology: the annual migration of Monarch butterflies from the upper Midwest to Mexico in North America; the case in which chick embryos are induced to develop teeth, and what this tells us about genetic signals during embryonic development; finally, the vexing question of how life could have originated on Earth from non-living matter.

Doing Biology: Three Case Studies

This chapter is built around three case studies of biological investigations carried out not only in three very different areas of biology, but also in three different settings: the experimental laboratory, the field under natural conditions, and in historical time using paleontology and the fossil record to answer questions about the evolutionary development of life on earth. The first, laboratory-based case concerns the investigation into the mechanism by which nerve fibers growing out from the central nervous system “find” their way to very specific target sites (muscles, for example) in the peripheral areas of the animal body. This work led to the discovery of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in the 1950s–1970s. The second, field-based case comes from a long-term investigation into the homing behavior in salmon: namely, an attempt to find out how adult salmon find their way from the ocean to the precise stream in which they hatched three or four years earlier. The third, historical case, involves the quest of evolutionary biologists to understand the causal factors in the extinction of the dinosaurs as part of a larger phenomenon known as “mass extinction”, during which numerous groups of organism all become extinct in a relatively short period of geological time.

The Social Context of Science: The Interaction of Science and Society

This chapter focuses on how science is embedded in various economic, social and cultural contexts. The chapter emphasizes that context is important in understanding both why a given scientific question is important at a given time and place, as well as how that context affected the content of the particular theory. The chapter turns to the “social construction” of science, that is, the process by which scientists (biologists in his case) construct a view of nature using models, metaphors and analogies, along with certain philosophical perspectives derived from their cultural circumstances. This view of science is contrasted to the older “treasure hunt” view, which sees the natural world and its relationships (laws or concepts) already existing, only to be “discovered” by the scientist. The chapter then moves on to consider four case studies dealing with the question of social responsibility of scientists and the use of their work: “eugenics,” the use of genetics to try and improve the social and mental qualities of the human population in the early twentieth century; the use of herbicides, developed initially for agricultural purposes, to defoliate forests in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war; issues revolving around the use of human embryonic stem cells for biomedical research; and the development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), including their impact on agriculture and farming practices. The ethical issues in the use of humans as subjects in research is illustrated by the history of the long-term Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in the United States (1930–1970). The final two sections of the chapter focus on the relationship between science and religion, including teaching some form of “creationism” or Intelligent Design in public schools alongside Darwinian evolution. Here, the chapter emphasizes the very different philosophical bases on which religious explanations of events in the natural world are built (philosophical idealism), compared to those in the sciences (philosophical materialism).

The Nature and Logic of Science: Testing Hypotheses

The main focus of this chapter is the process of formulating and testing hypotheses. Two basic ways in which hypotheses are tested is by either observations and/or experiments. In both cases the importance of uniformity of conditions and sample size is a central point. Two in-depth case studies, emphasizing the testing of hypotheses by observation, form the core of the chapter: physician John Snow’s mid-nineteenth century investigations into the cause of cholera and the search for the cause of the AIDS epidemic in the latter decades of the twentieth century.