Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 2.3
William of Occam was a Franciscan philosopher who came from the village of
Ockham (or Occam) in the county of Surrey in the United Kingdom. He tackled
the problem that for any given body of evidence you can almost always postulate
several, quite different explanations. William argued that in this situation the best
way to proceed is to prefer the simplest explanation that is consistent with all the
available evidence - the explanation that makes the least number of assumptions.
The word “razor” is used to mean that unnecessary assumptions are shaved away.
Occam's razor is sometimes referred to as the “principle of parsimony”; the word
“parsimony” means “economy”. Let me give you an example that actually happened
recently.
In 1976 the Viking spacecraft took the photograph of a rock formation on the
Martian surface, shown in Fig. 2.4a. This photograph caused a lot of excitement
because many people, including some scientists, interpreted it to mean that Martians
had carved the image of a human face on the rock. Now this interpretation clearly
makes a lot of assumptions - that intelligent creatures exist or have existed on
the planet Mars, that they know what humans look like, or even look like humans
Fig. 2.4
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