Survival of intellectual curiosity

The whole brain changes allowing scientific objectivity explained in http://gettingsciencegoingagain.blogspot.se/2015/01/non-status-science-is-possible.html also solves the mystery of intellectual curiosity. If intellectual curiosity was a specialized "psychological mechanism" selected by environmental change, it would devolve again during the stable periods between climate changes and never reach a high level. But if the absence of cognition/emotion distinction mean that intelligence itself creates intellectual curiosity, the mystery is solved. By the way, this also solves all sorts of mysteries of behaviors that are evolutionarily disadvantageous: intelligence itself just creates a lot of behaviors without specialized "mechanisms".

General new theories less Pareto-sensitivethan fine-tuning

Some who deny that "peer review" retards science claim that stagnation can be explained by only or mostly economically increased expensiveness, citing the Pareto principle. But the claim that it would be more harsh on breakthrough theories than on fine-tuning of existing ones ignores the fact that more general theories makes a greater number of predictions. Since there is always an individual variation in the cost of experiments, a greater number of predictions means that there is a greater chance of at least one of them being cheaply testable. Fine-tuning of existing theories makes much fewer new predictions. So if the Pareto principle was the culprit behind stagnation, fine-tuning of existing theories would have been more severely stagnated than breakthroughs to more general theories.