How to Break Through the Ceiling of Scientific Progress?-Innovation Challenges and Pathways Based on the Fitness Landscape Framework.

Science has not hit an absolute ceiling; it is stranded on a local peak. Viewed through Wright's fitness landscape, today's evaluation and funding systems over-select, refining work within established paradigms while suppressing the drift and recombination needed to cross fitness valleys. Restoring room for non-consensus, curiosity-driven and interdisciplinary research is an institutional task as much as an intellectual one.