Biological Terminology

Abstract

DR. BATHER insists (NATURE, June 16, p. 489) that systematic zoology and botany are not wholly based on description, and gives some interesting interpretations of his own. Of course he is right—as right as if I had said that Africa is a land mass, and he had retorted that there were lakes in it. Driven by necessity, we all, even systematic zoologists and botanists, and even from infancy, practise inference and seek to make sure. We employ crucial testing when we desire to ascertain whether an explanation is true. We neglect it (e.g. in favour of rhetoric) when we wish merely to convince ourselves or others that it is true—as in the case of politicians, theologians, and those 262 biologists who propounded 262 explanations of sex and did not attempt to test even one. But all serious scientific interpretation is governed by very stringent rules: we must found our suppositions on verifiable facts; we must try to think of all alternative explanations of those facts; and, lastly, we must seek fresh and unlike groups of facts which shall eliminate, one after another, all the erroneous explanations. Then, and not until then, shall we have finished with mere guessing. As Uberweg puts it: “One single circumstance which admits of one explanation only is more decisive than a hundred others which agree in all points with one's own hypothesis, but are equally well explained on an opposite hypothesis”.