The biological method

Every plant on a sunny balcony leans toward the window, never away from it. Is that an accident, or is something forcing it? Answering questions like this is exactly what the biological method is for.

Biology is systematized knowledge, built the same way as other sciences. It starts with observation, made through the five senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch.

A quantitative observation, recorded as a number, is more accurate than a qualitative one. The observer organizes these observations and states a hypothesis — a tentative explanation, still open to testing.

A hypothesis can come from deductive reasoning, moving from a general rule to one specific case, or from inductive reasoning, moving from specific cases to a general rule.

Sometimes a hypothesis comes another way: intuition, aesthetic preference, religious or philosophical ideas, comparison with another process, or even a lucky accident while looking for something else.

Hypotheses are tested again and again. One that survives repeated attempts to prove it false becomes a well-supported theory, with real predictive and explanatory power.

If a theory survives every skeptical attempt to break it, it becomes a scientific law: an almost unbreakable, universal fact of nature. Biology has very few laws, because life itself is too elusive.