There is No Hope of Doing Perfect Research Essay #2 (Essay Sample)

Insert name
Insert name of the course supervisor
Insert name of the course
Insert date assignment is due
There is No Hope of Doing Perfect Research
The quest to do a perfect research can be equated to the search for an unattainable state of utopia (Griffiths 97). I fully concur with this statement primarily because research is an endless activity that demands constant updates and revisions with the passage of time. Secondly, life exists in an imperfect state which means every research project will be prone to limitations such as time constraints, changes in research variables, personal bias, and unforeseen outside influences. These two factors make it impossible to come up with a perfect research design that addresses all future concerns in order to arrive at perfect and conclusive results. The imperfect nature of every research design coupled by never-ending changes in the course of time and the impracticality of predicting the future makes the pursuit of a 100% perfect research impossible.
To drive this point home, it is important to first understand the conditions a research project must meet to achieve perfection. Tatarkiewicz defines perfection as “a state of completeness and flawlessness” (7). These are the two conditions the results of any research must satisfy to achieve perfection. Since the objective of doing research is to find ways of improving the prevailing conditions or solve specific problems, a perfect research should therefore provide absolute results that are complete, flawless, and requiring no further investigations or revisions.
A good example of the inability of doing perfect research is the use of the DDT chemical as an agricultural insecticide. The insecticidal ability of DDT, which is an abbreviation for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, was discovered in 1931 leading to its great success in control of malaria and typhus. Paul Herman Muller, a chemist from Switzerland, was even awarded a Nobel Prize for his contribution in the discovery of DDT as an effective poison for most arthropods.
The use of DDT as an insecticide in agriculture rose to an all time high after the Second World War until 1962 when an American biologist Rachel Carson wrote about the environmental hazards of using the chemical in a book titled Silent Spring. Further research indicated that DDT had a potential for causing cancer and was a threat to birds and other wildlife (Lear 19). The findings led to a ban on the use of DDT in the United States in 1972. It was subsequently banned worldwide under the famous Stockholm Convention. A major invention that had begun as perfect research worth of a Nobel Prize was later negated and shelved on the annals of history. The DDT saga clearly demonstrates how it is not possible to conduct perfect research.
The endless debate on nature versus nurture in language acquisition is another example of how we can never hope to do complete and flawless research. Basically, language acquisition refers to a process through which humans develop the ability to recognize and comprehend language. It also includes the process by which we learn to use words as a way of communicating with others. Acquisition of first language refers to the process through which infants learn to speak and communicate with other members of the family and society. However, human languages seem too complex to be learned by infants with limited cognitive abilities. This led to the innatism theory of language acquisition which proposes that an infant is born with innate abilities to pick up its native language automatically (Lenneberg 74). There are other conflicting theories that maintain the premise that language is simply le...