Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Conduction Experiments on living things.

grivas.caitlin - 24-12-2016 at 20:57

How can conducting an experiment on living things be 100% accurate, Even if conducted multiple times by various scientists to prove accuracy and if each living thing is in the same genus and family by scientific order; making them the controlled variable, if they are different by genes and backgrounds therefore not identical and no longer the controlled variables.

Tsjerk - 25-12-2016 at 01:10

Welcome in the world of biology! You do what you can, after that they are inevitable variables, but that is generally accepted.

Bert - 25-12-2016 at 04:08


Inbred Strains
Quote:

For most animals, the usual procedure is mating of brother-sister pairs for a minimum of 20 generations, which will result in lines that are roughly 99% genetically identical.[1][2] Many inbred strains have been inbred for many more generations and are in effect isogenic.[3]


exodia - 25-12-2016 at 17:27

I suppose it all depends in whether you are experimenting from scratch or you have a previous hypothesis (tested or untested)

for example if someone ate 50gr of mercuric nitrate you could say with a near zero failure expectancy, that he will be poisoned, because you know how mercury interacts with your system and how you metabolize it and so on, so even in the human species (with plenty of genetic variables .... ok we are less than 1% different but that 1% is huge) you know what is gonna happen.

something different comes to mind if you are experimenting without the knowledge of the physical action that this experiment is doing to the organism.

so in my opinion is more useful to conduct experiments that you can "track down" to the actual cause, and if that cause is shared within the species/family/genus/order... you can hypothesise that the outcome will likely be true for all of them (regardless genetic differences)