Trial and error learning

Chirality is an essential property of life, which can be found throughout all biological self-assembled and self-organized architectures. Over many millennia nature has, through trial and error, learned how to utilize the chiral properties of the small building blocks, for example, amino acids and nucleic acids and how to express this structural property in a hierarchical process at the quaternary level. This expression of chirality at the quaternary level in turn... 

Psychoactive plants have been a part of human life since our beginning. Our first experiences with them probably came from foraging among plants for food. Through trial-and-error learning and behavioral reinforcement, experience has shaped our use of herbal drugs. Similarly,... 

One woman had, after much trial and error, learned the art of what she called open-minded vigilance. When asked to share the most basic lesson she had learned over the years, she replied ... 

All of which is okay, because about 60 percent readiness for independence is about the best parents can hope for. The late adolescent has to pick up the balance from the Big RRealitythrough the trial-and-error learning that opportunity and adversity provide. If parents and the late adolescent wait to separate until he or she is entirely ready for independence, separation will never begin. For the young man or young woman, the courage of late adolescence is to... 

Confusion arises when lack of direction creates fear of an undetermined future. Courage is going forward when you don t know which way to go. Parents need to avoid the double message "We want you to make your own choices, but we don t want you to make the wrong ones." Instead, acceptance of uncertainty would help "It takes exploring, and trial-and-error learning, for people to figure out what they want to do in life."... 

It is hard to think of any work-related skill that is more important than giving good job instruction. It helps a person learn how to perform a task correctly, quickly, conscientiously, and safely. Instruction also systematically substitutes for trial-and-error learning and is a reliable replacement for hit-or-miss instruction. Think of how wonderful it would be if we helped every person perform every task correctly, quickly, conscientiously, and safely The great thing is that a proven technique exists for effective instruction, especially for, though not limited to, manual tasks. 

Only natural dyes were known until the nineteenth century. By trial and error and probably also by chance, humans learned to extract and use a large variety of dyes of vegetable and animal origin. Dyes were extracted from the roots, trunk bark, and branches of trees, the stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits of plants, the bodies of insects and mollusks, and the eggs of insects. All the dyes obtained from natural sources are rather impure, and hence the accurate reproducibility of colors was almost impossible during antiquity. Still, many of the dyes and dyeing techniques used in antiquity were highly developed and remained in use until the discovery of the synthetic dyes in the middle of the nineteenth century (Colombo 1995 Robinson 1969). 

Learn how to design and produce new substances, materials, and molecular devices with properties that can be predicted, tailored, and tuned before production. This ability would greatly streamline the search for new useful substances, avoiding considerable trial and error. Recent and projected advances in chemical theory and computation should make this possible. 

Traditionally, lead compounds have been discovered in one of two ways. The hrst is one of trial and error. This is the way many plant and animal products and minerals have been found to be effective in the treatment of some medical disorder. For example, no one knows when the hrst person learned that chewing on the bark of the willow tree [Salix alba) helped relieve pain and reduce fever, but willow bark has been used in many cultures for untold centuries for just that purpose. Today we know that the active ingredient in willow bark is a derivative of salicylic acid (CgH4(OH)COOH), which today is sold commercially as aspirin or one of its analogs. Drug researchers continue to rely heavily on the study of folk medicines—a science known as ethnopharmacology—for the discovery of new plant and animal products that may have medical applications in the modern world. Indeed, scientists have discovered that the medical... 

Young fiavourists create the first formula in a trial-and-error approach. Experienced fiavourists know how to create the first blueprint based on a qualitative and quantitative skeleton in a focussed and efficient way, because the roles and the interactions of single compounds have been learned over the years. 

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves and that therefore Mendeleev s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo and come to think of it, it even rhymed ... 

---