I never actually got through my PhD and it was in physics anyway but yeah. It always seemed to me that the messier fields had these New Exciting Techniques ™ where you could vacuum up absolutely insane amounts of data and then play with stats till it showed what you wanted.

I don’t want to be like “Hur der they’re doing it wrong”. Studying anything to do with biology necessarily means you’re stuck with systems with trillions of variables and you have the awful problem of trying to design experiments where they hopefully average into background. I just thing that, consequently, until stuff replicates a few times (which, unfortunately, is almost never done because it’s not sexy. Anyway often papers are written so badly, and the universe so gloriously subtle, even mechanistic stuff like synthesis is a struggle to replicate) big headlines are irresponsible.