PubMed · 292442
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P Moore. 1979-12-04. Looking up!. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.4804350
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The current research examined whether children could use certain metaconceptual criteria such as the range of explanation, non-ad hocness of explanation, empirical consistency, and logical consistency to choose between competing accounts of physical phenomena. The tasks were constructed so that the conceptual content of the explanations to be evaluated was either consistent, inconsistent, or neutral with regard to children's prior knowledge. It was found that even 7-year-olds could use metaconceptual criteria such as the range, empirical consistency, and logical consistency of theories when the theories did not violate their beliefs. However only older children (11-year-olds) showed a systematic preference for non-ad hoc theories over ad hoc ones. The findings are consistent with recent work in the philosophy of science showing that, in evaluating theoretical alternatives, scientists are influenced by their prior beliefs about the domain being considered. This research demonstrates that even young children share some of the cognitive underpinnings of scientific rationality that scientists do.
It is proposed that high velocity asteroidal impacts with the Earth created polymeric nucleotide sequences out of monomeric nucleotides via direct compressive forces. The developed model describes the simultaneous formation of histone-equivalent proteins and RNA/DNA-equivalent template structures as a natural and expected consequence of bolide impactions with organic material accumulating on the crustal surface of the Earth approximately 3.8-3.5 billion years ago. It is shown that literally billions of different gene-equivalent nucleotide sequences, each one having a set of surface-complementary histone-equivalent proteins, might be created in such a manner. It is hypothesized that it is this process that gave rise to the chemical substrate upon which Darwinian selective forces have acted ever since.
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