The evidence for a revised view of Amazonia will take many people by surprise. Ecologists have assumed that tropical ecosystems were shaped entirely by natural forces and they have focused their research on habitats they believe have escaped human influence. But as the University of Florida ecologist, Peter Feinsinger, has noted, an approach that leaves people out of the equation is no longer tenable. The archaeological evidence shows that the natural history of Amazonia is to a surprising extent tied to the activities of its prehistoric inhabitants.

Although the lives of the Siriono have changed in the intervening decades, the image of them as Stone Age relics has endured. Indeed, in many respects the Siriono epitomise the popular conception of life in Amazonia. To casual observers, as well as to influential natural scientists and regional planners, the luxuriant forests of Amazonia seem ageless, unconquerable, a habitat totally hostile to human civilisation. The apparent simplicity of Indian ways of life has been judged an evolutionary adaptation to forest ecology, living proof that Amazonia could not - and cannot - sustain a more complex society. Archaeological traces of far more elaborate cultures have been dismissed as the ruins of invaders from outside the region, abandoned to decay in the uncompromising tropical environment.

The myth of scientific method is not only that it is inductive (which we have seen is incorrect) but also that the hypothetico-deductive method proceeds in a step-by-step, inevitable fashion. Thehypothetico-deductive method describes the logical approach to much research work, but it does not describe the psychological behaviour that brings it about. This is much more holistic —involving guesses, reworkings, corrections, blind alleys and above all inspiration, in the deductive as well as the hypothetic component -than is immediately apparent from reading the final thesis or published papers. These have been, quite properly, organised into a more serial, logical order so that the worth of the output may be evaluated independently of the behavioural processes by which it was obtained. It is the difference, for example between the academic papers with which Crick and Watson demonstrated the structure of the DNA molecule and the fascinating book The Double Helix in which Watson (1968) described how they did it. From this point of view, ‘scientific method’ may more usefully be thought of as a way of writing up research rather than as a way of carrying it out.

在讲义这段话里, 中心句为最后一句话, 整段文章较抽象, 但在最后却给出了观点总结的指令词 “from this point of view”, 那说明文章的前面在解释这个观点的内容, 而到最后对这个观点做了总结, 最后一句话突出了两者的比较, 根据我们在课上所提到的在两者比较的逻辑关系中, 两者比较对象是很重要的, 所以答案为 “vi. how research is done and how it is reported”。