-There are many ways in which we may learn the answers to questions. Consider the following:

What’s your name?

What type of job should you get?

Can we clone human beings?

Should we clone human beings?

Hence, what our knowledge is based on many different ways of knowing.

One method of gaining knowledge is science.

-So, what IS science? It has been defined many ways, and its meaning has changed with time.

- In its most fundamental sense, modern science is a process by which we try to answer questions about how the natural world works and how it came to be that way.

- It is NOT a process for merely collecting "facts" about, or just describing, the natural world, although such observations do provide the raw material for scientific understanding.

Why do some people have dark skin?

Why do we have fevers?

Why do women have menopause?

Why do we sleep?

Why do snowshoe hares turn white?

Teleological answers: a doctrine explaining natural phenomenon by its final causes

Proximate answers- identify the preceeding physical causes and mechanisms: they tell us what, when, where, and how, but not why

We need to explain how these phenomenons ultimately came to be the way that they are and not some other way.

1859: The Theory of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin

-Finally able to scientifically answer the ultimate questions of biology

- Natural selection helps us to answer most “why” question about anatomy, behavior, genetics, life cycles, medicine, etc.

-The theory of evolution by natural selection unites all areas of biological knowledge

-“nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” – Dobzhansky (The American Biology Teacher, 1973)