Question

Why do scientist study the natural world to find solutions to human problems?

Answer 1

Because ... strange as it may seem ...

 --  humans are part of the natural world,

 --  our problems all result from our attempts to either coexist with the natural world or to avoid it and game the system,

and

 --  whatever solutions we wind up adopting will still need to work in the natural world.

Answer 2

Answer:

Science can not solve all of our problems. While scientific understanding can help battle things like disease, hunger, and poverty when applied properly, it does not do so completely and automatically. Furthermore, there are many areas of life where science can have little impact. Let us look at some of the reasons why this is so.  First of all, there is a huge difference between knowing something and acting on it. Science is concerned with accumulating and understanding observations of the physical world. That understanding alone solves no problems. Individual people have to act on that understanding for it to help solve problems. For instance, science has found that regular exercise can lower your risk of heart disease. Knowing this fact is interesting, but it will do nothing for your personal heath unless you act on it and actually exercise. And that's the hard part. Reading an article about exercise is easy. Getting into an actual routine of regular exercise is harder. In this sense, science really solves no problems at all. Problems are only solved when people take the knowledge (or tool, or pill, or whatever) provided by science and use it. In fact, many of humanity's biggest problems are caused by lack of action, and not lack of knowledge.

Take world hunger, for example. There is currently enough food produced on the earth every year to comfortably feed every single person. The world produces about 700 trillion grams of rice each year. With seven billion people on the planet, 365 days in the year, and about 40 grams per typical serving of rice, there is enough rice on the planet to feed every single last person seven servings of rice every day. And this is just rice. Similar numbers hold up for wheat, corn, meat, etc. Science has done an amazing job in the last 50 years of making farms productive. And yet, millions of people in the world still suffer starvation. Why? Because of actions. If all it took was science to solve problems, no one would go hungry anymore because there is enough food. We could fill books with the analysis of human actions that cause world hunger if we wanted to.

Explanation: