Arguments for Experimentation in Biology

Abstract

“An experiment,” the Oxford Dictionary of the History of Science records, “unlike an experience, is a designed practical intervention in Nature; its upshot is a socially contrived set of observations, carried out under artificially produced and deliberately controlled, reproducible conditions. At the experiment's core is the notion that the conditions for producing a given effect can be separated into independently variable factors, in such a way as to demonstrate how the factors behave in their natural (i.e. the non-experimental) state.” (Dictionary 1981, p. 136). Around 1900, some biologists would have acceded to such a definition, yet many would have offered alternatives. Some would have denied that the conditions in question must be “designed” or artificially produced; nature may also provide experiments. Others would have emphasized the use of experimentally-derived observations for hypothesis testing; experimentation goes beyond the mere experiment itself, that is. A variety of additional definitions would have been advanced as well, illustrating the lack of one such orthodox interpretation as the Dictionary now offers.

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