Statistical criteria should (1) be sensitive to change in the specific factors tested, (2) be insensitive to changes, of a magnitude likely to occur … - George E. P. Box

The penalty for scientific irrelevance is, of course, that the statistician's work is ignored by the scientific community.

A mechanistic model has the following advantages: 1. It contributes to our scientific understanding of the phenomenon under study. 2. It usually provides a better basis for extrapolation (at least to conditions worthy of further experimental investigation if not through the entire range of all input variables). 3. It tends to be parsimonious (i.e, frugal) in the use of parameters and to provide better estimates of the response

A man in daily muddy contact with field experiments could not be expected to have much faith in any direct assumption of independently distributed normal errors.