Page 19 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

CHAPTER 2

Philosophy and Ethics of Research in Science

Subhash C. Lakhotia

Introduction

All living organisms have to be curious and need to gather information about their surrounding
environment if they wish to survive. The organic evolution, generally leading to organisms with
increasing biological complexity, has been associated with more efficient sensory systems for acquiring
information about the surroundings. This has been paralleled by more analytical neural processing
of the information and efficient decision-making capacity. While all living organisms have innate
curiosity to know about their environment, the evolution of more complex biological organization
has been accompanied by, and perhaps dependent upon, an enhanced and proactive curiosity about
the surroundings. Among living organisms, the human species seems to have the highest degree of
organized curiosity, which, when formalized, is named as research.
Acquisition of the power of highly articulated voice communication by the human species lies at the
root of proactively planned and organized research as a social phenomenon. In the general sense,
all living organisms are social since they communicate and interact with other individuals of their
own kind, and with individual of other species. These communications in most cases are through
chemicals released by individuals or by direct physical contacts. Sound, as a mode of communication
between individuals is used mostly in the animal kingdom, especially in those that biologists consider
as higher organisms or more ‘evolved’ because of their greater biological complexity. We are more
familiar with sounds produced by various insects, frogs, birds, and mammals because our auditory
sensory system can recognize those vibrations. Although, we can perceive these sounds, they remain
mostly unintelligible to us. The patterns of sound vibrations produced by an organism are recognized
as ‘language’. The human species has evolved highly intricate language systems, which have played
major role in the origin and evolution of human social systems. A quantum jump in communication
between human individuals took place when besides the spoken language, based on production of
sound through the larynx and sensed by the ear, was supplemented with language written by hand and
perceived by the eyes. Spoken and written languages enabled mankind to transfer new information
and/or new interpretation of phenomena not only to other contemporary fellow beings but also to
future generations. The ability to pass on the information or knowledge gathered by an individual
to generations that do not still exist has been the key factor underlying the remarkable progress of
various civilizations through human history. Such passage of information and knowledge across
generations transformed the knowledge base to be additively cumulative, which in turn, catalysed
the rapid intellectual and technological advances witnessed during the past few millennia. This also
generated the highly intricate and varied social organizations that human species displays, and which
in our characteristic anthropocentric view, make us consider human species to be the most highly
evolved social animal.

A society’s orderly organization requires reduced entropy, which is achieved by placing certain
restraints on individual freedom through rules and regulations. Most animal societies follow innate
social behaviour, which seems to have evolved through the action of natural selection to effectively
maintain the given social system and order. However, thanks to language and the long learning period,

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