> I don't quite follow this line of reasoning. I must be misunderstanding something because Sarah is way smarter than I am. But it seems to me the diminishing r

> I don't quite follow this line of reasoning. I must be misunderstanding something because Sarah is way smarter than I am. But it seems to me the diminishing returns in biological science are due discoveries having a smaller impact, not on the quality of the paper. i.e. a 1985 paper doesn't have more of an impact than a 2019 paper, but a paper released in 1985 has a bigger impact than that same paper released in 2019. Less competition leads to less p-hacking, less pressure to publish or perish leads to greater risk taking in experiments, fewer proximate measures of impact lead to more confidence that results are real rather than an artifact of finding some intermediate measure that looks significant, and just random fashion leading to some areas going out of style that would actually have been fruitful if pursued further.