If 99% of the people are idiots and 1% of them ask a question you cannot immediately answer; congratulations: you just got 1% smarter and 1% is a HUGE gain in any endeavour worth earnestly chasing.

That sounds very good until you have to deal with that 99% who are trying to discredit you and ruin your career. You should read to get a little taste for the kind of "questions" you usually get: http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog The whole question is a little bit mute anyway as a mechanism for dealing with this, any many other problems, is already used: replication of results. Published results are generally not widely accepted until they can be replicated in a different lab. This overcomes any coding errors, but more importantly, equipment errors, user errors, random chance, and even active data manipulation. I think what most people who are not actively involved in research fail to realize is what an iterative process science is. Early results are often, maybe even usually, error ridden. This can come from bad code or anything else. But as more people work on it and improve it the errors are removed and the final product is something very close to ground truth, and the longer it is discussed the closer it gets to that goal. If you don't believe me I would ask you where you think computers, automobiles, pain killers, vaccines, rockets, cameras, genetically modified mice, and skyscrapers come from. All of those required an incredible detailed, and accurate, knowledge of how the working components function. Science, it works bitches.

There were these two wars, can't remember what they were called, but they were pretty big, involved most of the world....ummm give me a sec I'll come up with it.