>Your examples are headline understandings of science, and not how science actually progresses. I do science every day. I have done science for all of my adult

>Your examples are headline understandings of science, and not how science actually progresses. I do science every day. I have done science for all of my adult life, at the best research institutions in America. I have a very intimate understanding of how science works. My guess from your writing is that you are NOT a scientist, you're an engineer with a deep technical education. You have learned a lot of science but you don't spend much time actually doing it. In point of fact science is a culture; its practitioners are subject to all sorts of weaknesses, moral and rational, that end up in its method. Let me give you an example from my field - my current PI invented CTLA4 blockade, a cancer immunotherapy, in 1996. His PhD advisor, Jim Allison, just won the Nobel Prize for this work. Since about 2014 people have become interested in immunotherapy following several successful new therapies, but it was largely ignored since 1996 - why? Because the cancer establishment wasn't interested. People who wished to study the immune component of cancer were shunned or ridiculed, and what is now an entire field was reduced to a rump study of the "tumor microenvironment" that could never receive funding. Why is it receiving funding now? Because drug companies are interested now that there are successful therapies on the market. The actual scientific evidence, meanwhile, was produced a generation ago. What this means is that whatever epistemology is at work in "science" is not merely evidence-driven, it's subject to all sorts of human foibles, being done by humans.