ABSTRACT
This chapter describes about the importance of having a hypothesis, and building that hypothesis in a logical framework within the introduction. The introduction serves to inform the reader about why this particular hypothesis was chosen, introducing both the dependent and independent (response and determinate) variables, as well as the presumed mechanism by which the hypothesis can be falsified. A framework for writing the introduction starts with the big idea and ends with the hypothesis. There are quite a few papers that synthesise hypotheses in various areas of biology. There are some theories and hypotheses in ecology, while these wide ranging papers about so-called ‘laws’ in biology and ecology. Each of these papers will give students a list of big ideas, together with the citations for seminal papers that have built them. They will note that many of these theories are very old with some dating back to Darwin.
