For Better Science, Bring on the Revolutionaries

A leading biologist at Harvard, Pardis Sabeti, has called out the replication movement in psychology, calling it a "cautionary tale" of how efforts to reform research may "end up destroying new ideas before they are fully explored." Her argument, in short, is that the "vicious" debate over statistical errors in that field has only stymied further progress. There's "a better way forward," Sabeti says, "through evolution, not revolution." For comparison, she describes what happened in her own field of human genomics: A rash of false-positive results gave way about 10 years ago, without much fuss or incivility, to a new and better way of doing science. "We emerged more engaged, productive, successful, and united," she says.