Complex science is very hard

Three articles which illustrate the difficulty of the sort of science which tackles what Jim Manzi would term phenomena characterized by high causal density. First, the simplest one is the report that extrapolating from some mouse models to human biological systems may be problematic. Anyone who has talked to human geneticists who use mouse models is aware that these inbred lineages can be somewhat particular and specific. Order the wrong mice, and all of your experimental designs might be for naught. So the result is not surprising, but it seems useful to have it documented in such a concrete fashion (though this has been reported in the media before). Second, a long piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the problems in replicating ground breaking research in the area of priming. This may be a case of a robust result which turns out to fade into irrelevance as time ...