• Introduction
• Objectives
• Readings & Articles
• Lecture
• Global View
• Assessment

Readings and Articles

For this module, please:

• Read "The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method." (Pages 1-4) Take time to read this carefully.  This publication by the Geological Society of America discusses the topics of this module in much more detail than your text. Some parts of this document will also be useful for the next module. Cite as: McLelland, Christine V., “The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method,” The Geological Society of America, August 2006.
• Listen to the following audio news articles. Wait to listen to these until they show up in the Module. 
  • Listen (using a media player) to a news story on the age-fighting benefits of substances found in red wine and the science (and non-science) behind them (6 minutes and 12 seconds).
  • Listen (using a media player) to a news story on the science behind deer warning systems. This story shows how commercial products are created and advertised to the public with or without regard to science (4 minutes and 24 seconds).
• Read this short article from Scientific American by Daniel T. Willingham: “Trust Me, I’m a Scientist:  Why so many people choose not to believe what scientists say.”  Read this now as we will discuss the vaccine and autism example in the “What science isn’t” section of the Lecture. (1 page).

Additional resources you may access to learn more about the topics in this module:
(These are optional resources, not required content for exams, quizzes, homework.)

• If you have kids, watch an episode of Dinosaur Train with your kids.  This is a PBS show that actually does a very good job of explaining what a hypothesis is, how to create one, and how to test it.  (They also get the geologic time scale correct!) Check your local listings for times or watch it streaming from pbskids.org.  The shows air in 15 minute segments.
• Visit the website called Bad Science.  This website looks at current topics in science and how they are portrayed in the media, showing where the ideals of science and the scientific method are misapplied.
• Skeptics Magazine: The Skeptics Society is a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas and the promotion of science. Their mission is to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on extraordinary ideas and claims. Their magazines are typically on sale at Borders or Barnes & Noble. Although labeled as “anti-religious” by religious conservatives, the group simply uses the scientific method to disprove outlandish claims of any variety (which members of religious groups sometimes make).

In case you are bored this weekend:

• Read A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks" (Paperback) by Clifford Conner. In this persuasive history, Conner aggressively pursues evidence of how, since the earliest civilizations, elite scientists have suppressed and excluded lower class innovators while learning from and using their discoveries, often without giving them credit. As Conner notes, many of the "Great Man" myths about people like Galileo and Columbus, once believed to have made their contributions to science out of their own genius, have been debunked, but even those persist in the popular imagination, and others have never been addressed.
• Read Why Do People Believe Weird Things? by Michael Shermer. This second edition of the bestseller explores why people, supposedly living in an enlightened era, continue to embrace strange ideas. More importantly, he deals with controversies no longer on the margins of society: Creation “science,” Holocaust “revisionism,” extreme Afrocentrism, race and IQ, political extremism, and such modern-day witch-crazes as Repressed Memory Syndrome, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Facilitated Communication, moral panics, and mass hysterias.