It is a natural and honest state in which research finds itself when it is genuinely working at the frontier of what is known.

The popular expectation of science is often that it produces definitive answers — that a study is either right or wrong, that a question either has an answer or does not, that uncertainty is a problem to be eliminated rather than a condition to be accurately described.

This expectation produces the kind of media coverage in which every new genetic study produces a headline claiming that “scientists have discovered” something final and definitive, only to be followed a few years later by another headline announcing that the previous finding has been “overturned.”

The Population Y story is a good corrective to this expectation.