Areas of knowledge - natural science
Natural Science
Scope, perspective, methods and ethics
The prestige of natural science rests on a particular claim: that its methods can produce knowledge independent of who is doing the producing. A law of physics is the same in Lagos and Lausanne; a chemical reaction does not change with the nationality of the chemist. That independence is real, and it matters. But it does not follow that natural science is free from perspective, or that the knowledge it produces comes with instructions for how it should be used. The same understanding of DNA that enables cancer treatment also enabled He Jiankui to edit the germline of two human embryos. The same statistical tools that now appear in IB Maths Topic 4 were built at a laboratory explicitly dedicated to eugenics.
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The four pages of this theme examine what natural science actually claims, and what those claims do and do not settle. The Scope page asks what kind of knowledge scientific certainty is and where it stops. The Perspectives page asks what any scientific framework makes visible and what it makes impossible to ask. The Methods and Tools page examines what the empirical test requires beyond its own logic - the institutional machinery that makes it work, and what happens when that machinery has structural failures. The Ethics page asks what scientific knowledge obliges those who produce it to do, and what it permits them to use.
The JWST can measure the age of the universe to within a few million years. This page asks what kind of knowledge that is - whether provisionality is a flaw or a feature, and where the scientific method runs out. Feynman, Sagan, Kuhn, and Nagel trace that boundary from different directions.
Two drug regulators examined the same thalidomide data in 1960 and reached different conclusions. This page asks not who was right but what made each observer look differently at the same evidence. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sandra Harding, and George Joseph examine what any scientific framework makes visible - and what it makes structurally impossible to ask.
Popper's falsification logic is clean: a claim is scientific if there is some observation that could show it wrong. But logic alone does not run experiments, fund labs, or discipline researchers who suppress inconvenient results. This page examines what the empirical method actually requires beyond its own logic, and what happens when the institutional machinery fails.
He Jiankui announced in 2018 that he had edited the germline of human embryos using CRISPR - a tool whose implications its own developers had not anticipated. This page examines what scientific knowledge obliges those who hold it to do. Washington, Skloot, Oreskes and Conway, and Singer trace where the obligation was met, and where it was not.