Popular science writing often allows, if not actively encourages, a fundamental misunderstanding about what the results of a single study mean for science. In the news media and even in textbooks, scientific activity is often portrayed as a collecting process, and a scientific paper as the report of what has been collected. By this view, scientists search out the facts that nature has hidden away; each uncovered fact is published in a scientific paper like a stamp laid in a collector’s album; textbooks are essentially collections of such facts. But science doesn’t work like this. The results
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