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© Copyright 1998, Jim Loy
I saw a patch of purple dirt. It was actually pulverized purple rock. And, sprouting from the purple dirt were purple flowers. Bear with me, now. Is there a relationship? Can purple flowers be caused by purple dirt? Are we engaging in real science, here?
We are engaging in real science, to the point where we call the above a hypothesis. That is a beginning of the scientific method: observation and hypothesis. We can now test our hypothesis. It turns out that our hypothesis is false. Biologists might find it rather amusing. But, we tried.
By the way, how could we test our hypothesis? Well, we could do a study of all of the purple dirt that we can dig up, and we would find no obvious relationship with purple flowers. We could determine the species of purple flower that I saw, and find the same species in black dirt and red dirt..., all with the same purple colored petals. We could, if we were really good, determine if the thing that makes the dirt purple is present in the petals of the purple flowers.
What makes the dirt purple is a kind of pigment. This pigment is a fairly simple, inorganic chemical, similar to the pigments in paints. What makes the flower purple is another pigment. The pigments in flowers tend to be very complex organic chemicals. This knowledge would tend to make a biologist skeptical of my hypothesis, above.