ABSTRACT
Darwin framed the first edition of the Origin with two epigraphs, both from people who are probably best known now for their contributions to the study of scientific method. One is from Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a man famous for his insistence on scrupulous and exhaustive observation if scientific knowledge is to be acquired, and who, it is said, died from a cold following an experiment in which he stuffed a chicken with snow:
Bacon was a highly regarded figure among many of Darwin’s most influential contemporaries. They thought of him as the father of the ‘inductive method’ in science; that is, a method that places great store on the meticulous gathering of numerous experimental results before confidence is placed in any hypothesis. More specifically, this method warns against leaping to general theoretical positions simply because they are consonant with some small number of observations.
