Science Is a Team Sport Across Generations

The popular image of science still loves the solitary genius.

Newton under his apple tree.

Darwin with his notebooks.

Einstein at his desk.

Real science is much noisier.

It involves students, technicians, statisticians, reviewers, software developers, competing laboratories, databases, previous generations of researchers and people who notice that something in somebody else's paper does not quite add up.

The National Academies report puts this directly:

“Science is a communal enterprise.”

Scientific claims become valuable partly because other scientists can inspect them.

That requires communication.

Another researcher should be able to understand what was measured, how samples were chosen, how data were processed, which observations were excluded, what statistical assumptions were made and how much uncertainty accompanies the result.

Without those details, a published result becomes strangely isolated.

Others may cite it.

They may even believe it.

But they cannot properly interrogate it.

This is why transparency is not merely a fashionable add-on to science. It is part of the mechanism through which science becomes collective knowledge.

The report describes science as a process in which researchers confirm, dispute and refine one another's findings. The ability to scrutinize claims allows confidence to accumulate over time.

That also explains why criticism in science should not automatically be interpreted as hostility.

When another laboratory tries to replicate your result, it is subjecting the claim to one of the processes through which scientific knowledge becomes stronger.

When somebody finds a limitation, they may have discovered the boundary of the phenomenon.

And boundaries are scientifically interesting.

A biological effect that exists only in juveniles, only under nutritional stress, only within a certain genetic background or only at a particular temperature tells us more about the underlying mechanism than the original claim that the effect happens everywhere.

Science therefore advances not only when someone says yes.

It also advances when someone asks:

Under exactly what conditions is that yes actually true?

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Further reading: This post is based on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science, a consensus study report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/25303.