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I only say it is desirable to be able to replicate results. Nowhere do I say that science must consist ONLY of replicating results. It actually is a bit weird to me that so many people leap to this conclusion when it is obviously falsified by other existing sciences where results absolutely can be exactly replicated and yet scientists do not deliberately discard that ability.

Replication of results is merely a step in the process. Once you establish replicated results, you proceed from there. Maybe you observe that the results are irrelevant because your monkey is weird in some way, and you test it on another monkey to establish that point; others can then examine their copies and decide whether you've got a point. Maybe you build on the experiment with a standard test bed. Maybe you take apart the apparatus to demonstrate how a bit of impurity corrupted the results, and then everybody else can do the same disassembly. Maybe you shuffle in some new monkeys and hardware and run the test again to be sure. Not being able to precisely replicate results is a handicap that the various sciences proceeds through anyhow because it has no choice, not a desirable part of the process. Sure, there's a small amount of danger that you might overfit your results, but there's no guarantees anywhere; it's less than the danger that you face from non-replicable results. Not having replicability only throws away options, options that smart people could use to further their science, option that when missing can only slow progress down. That dumb people might misuse it really isn't a very interesting point.

And again, I reiterate that to the extent possible animal researchers do in fact try their best to get animals identical as possible, so I give you not only the theory I outline above, but the practice of biology as well, where carefully controlled standardized gene lines are used.




I work in a lab that does monkey research. What you say is more true about smaller animals like mice, where there are lots of variants, knockouts, etc.

Macaques don't really offer those kinds of options, at least not that I've ever heard of. You just hope they're healthy, disease-free, relatively smart, and are easy to get along with.




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