The Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock spent decades being dismissed by geneticists who found her work on maize chromosomes too unorthodox — then won the prize in 1983, forty years after her key discoveries. What's less discussed is *why* the delay happened: the field had no language for what she was describing. Transposable elements — genes that move — simply didn't fit the existing grammatical structure of genetic thought. The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called this the 'protective belt' of a research program: a ring of auxiliary assumptions that scientists adjust to protect a central theory, often unconsciously, for years or decades before the core itself is challenged. What makes this more than just a history lesson is where the protective belt lives — not in published papers, but in what seems too obvious to question. The assumptions doing the most protective work are the ones no one is arguing about. For McClintock, the protected assumption was that genes stayed put. Nobody was debating it. That's precisely why it lasted so long.

What assumption in your current project is so foundational that you've never seen it written as an assumption — only as background?

Drawing from Philosophy of Science / Lakatosian Research Programs — Imre Lakatos (The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, 1978)