ABSTRACT
Scientists desire results, and they will buy and attend to statisticians and statistical procedures that promise them. What people end up with is too often horoscopic: vague and optimistic, but still claiming critical importance. Statistical inference is indeed critically important. But only as much as every other part of research. Scientific discovery is not an additive process, in which sin in one part can be atoned by virtue in another. Everything interacts. Science is a population-level process of variation and selective retention. It does not operate on individual hypotheses, but rather on populations of hypotheses. It comprises a mix of dynamics that may, over long periods of time, reveal the clockwork of nature. This is analogous to how natural selection can adapt a biological population to its environment, even though most individual variation in any one generation is the maladaptive.
