Darwin Scientific Method

Which Scientific Method did Darwin Use?
Francisco J. Ayala argues that there is a contradiction between how Charles Darwin portrayed his methodology to the public and how he portrayed his methodology in his personal notebooks. The book, The Origin of Species, explains that Darwin used inductive reasoning in order to develop his theory. Specifically, he wrote that he acted on true Baconian principles and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale. Historically, the main method of reasoning used in Darwin’s time was the inductive method.
Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill proposed Induction as a method for coming up with universal truths by collecting empirical data without any preconceived notion on the subject.
Using this method,

An example of this method is a scientist who observes everything, and observes 5 trees in a row that all have leaves. From these observations, he comes up with the statement that all trees have leaves. The disadvantages of this method are that a scientist will not study anything without a plan because scientists will study the topics that interest them the most. Darwin wrote as an example of this disadvantage that a scientist might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors. Another disadvantage is that universal truths cannot be made from induction. This is because no matter how many trees are observed with leaves, there is still the possibility that the next tree will

The notebooks appear to show that Darwin entertained the hypothesis of evolutionary transmutation shortly after his return from the voyage of the Beagle. Darwin also tested his hypothesis many times by spending many years on experiments and observations with barnacles and fertilization of orchids. These facts show the contradicting information from what he published to the public and what he actually did.
New ideas and creativity are important to science because science is done using the hypothetico-deductive method. The first part of this method is developing a hypothesis, sometimes by being imaginative or creative. An example of being creative was when Kekulé saw a hexagon in his fireplace and it inspired him to suggest as a hypothesis that benzene’s structure
Student - Summer 2015 Bio 100 - P2D1. Page 1 of 2 resembled a hexagon. Hypotheses like this guide the scientist to observe and experiment in order to validate that fragment of invented theoretical world. Similarly, it was creativity that allowed
Mendel to suggest the existence of hereditary traits in pea plants.
Even though a creative hypothesis is developed, it still needs to be tested. The criterion of demarcation involves 4 different ways to test the validity of a hypothesis. The first criteria is