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I am just going to wonder around this idea.
Try to see that child learning, development, and thinking are strongly patterned and sequenced in phases that have a cumulative effect. The whole arch of these sequences and patterns is very much like a `system' that in its cumulative total, is more successful than most science. Piaget and others gave it the name ontogenetic.
My limited experiences with experimental bio-science were a lot more like play than anything else. We were playing around with this or that technique, this or that idea about what was going on. We had to invent a `system' that followed a particular argument and show how results were related to this argument.
The real kicker was the work failed to demonstrate the basic hypothesis. Based on a logically deduced math model, we were supposed to see a particular pattern in the imaging results. There was no pattern.
A year later, a guy working along similar lines back in Penn State called up. We had been to his lab for one phase of the work. He had an idea for a paper that would use the work in the converse sense, that it demonstrated a particular part of accepted wisdom in the topic was wrong and could not be right. It was clever enough to at least get my buddy into print... Negative results are usually not reported, unless they are useful in knocking down accepted wisdom.
Anyway, there was a lot more learning going on with me, through failure than there would have been in success. Most science work fails. What makes science look systematic is they only keep and present the work that succeeds...and fits some system of thought on the topic.
CG