At Nature Human Behaviour, we are told that the replication crisis is due to lack of rigid adherence to such a theory:
Science, he explains, is about accumulating sets of observations that occur reliably—the Sun appears at different places in the sky depending on the season and time of day; finches have different shaped beaks depending on what they eat. “That’s the raw ingredients,” he says. “To make sense of it requires a framework to say, this is how all these different facts fit together, and this is why.” We explain these observations by developing theoretical models—of how the Earth rotates around the Sun on a tilted axis, of natural selection. Cathleen O’Grady, “The replication crisis may also be a theory crisis” at ArsTechnica
That’s not self-evident to everyone:
Tal Yarkoni, a vocal critic of poor behavioral science, agrees with the prescription of more formal modelling, but otherwise he thinks that more of a focus on theory could be a terrible idea. “Many of our problems actually stem from far too much concern with elegant theoretical frameworks,” Yarkoni argues. Muthukrishna and Henrich draw on the analogy of natural selection in biology, which Yarkoni considers apt. While it’s true that all of biology hangs on the principles of natural selection, for many areas of active biological research, he argues, “the distance between the ‘overarching theoretical framework’ and the concrete mechanisms under investigation is so vast that it’s usually pointless to consider the former at all.”
Instead, he suggests, the best way forward is to “accept that the world is really complicated. That in most domains even our best theories can only hope to explain a small fraction of the variation in the behaviors we’re interested in, and that we should probably place much more emphasis than we do on large-scale description and prediction (and less on causal explanation).” Cathleen O’Grady, “The replication crisis may also be a theory crisis” at ArsTechnica
Funny that Darwinian natural selection would be such a strong theory that “all of biology hangs on” it but that in many areas, it is “usually pointless” to consider it at all.
Paper. (paywall)
We can be fairly certain that any kind of double-down
See also: Natural Selection At Work: Smarter Chickadees Survive The Winter More Often
Darwinian Grandmother Hypothesis Takes Another Hit
and
Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?
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