“Someone who thinks up a new theory is the last person who should be trusted with the job of testing it. A new theory should be tested by independent researchers who aren’t cronies of the theorist and who don’t have an axe to grind. It’s division of labor again: proposing theories and doing research to test them are jobs that should be carried out by different entities.

“A good theory should go in advance of the evidence,” the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller said in a recent interview. “It should stick its neck out and say, this is how I think the world is, and leave it to other people to test it.”

Making a virtue of necessity, I will leave it to other people to test my theory.”