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Stepwise progress doesn’t hit the headlines

Science itself works very badly as a news story: it is by its very nature a subject for the “features” section, because it does not generally move ahead by sudden, epoch-making breakthroughs. It moves ahead by gradually emergent themes and theories, supported by a raft of evidence from a number of different disciplines on a number of different explanatory levels. Yet the media remain obsessed with “new breakthroughs”.

Goldacre B. Bad Science. London: Fourth Estate, 2008, p219.