Much of the scientific literature in biology is working off of hypotheses that don't have a huge amount of evidence. There are a large number of studies that pr

Much of the scientific literature in biology is working off of hypotheses that don't have a huge amount of evidence. There are a large number of studies that present a molecular mechanism which, if studied in depth, will not always be consistent with what is presented in the literature. This is often dealt with by appending several conditions that must be met, such that the combinatorial space grows large enough and the only study that is done that meets the requirements is the one being presented. In this way, almost anything can be stated to fit some shiny new hypothesis. This is effectively the science based method, since it can be tracked to a, perhaps, 'plausible' mechanism (although often now lean towards more 'intriguing' than parsimonious, especially if published somewhere like Nature) Evidence based medicine has other faults. One subfield is meta-analysis, which looks for very solid observations that are reproducible, but often lacks the complicated modeling that may be necessary to see any highly conditional effects. So the findings tend to be real, but boring and often "well-known". It is however, a good way to check if the "well-known" observations in the literature are reproducible.