Comment by conmod278

*"The Evolution of Human Science"* (originally published in Nature in 2000 as "Catching Crumbs from the Table"), collected in Stories of Your Life and Others.

It's a very short piece written as a journal editorial. Metahumans have advanced so far beyond human comprehension that they do all the original science, communicating via digital neural transfer that humans can't access. Human scientists are left doing hermeneutics: interpreting metahuman publications and reverse-engineering their artifacts, trying to decode work they couldn't have produced themselves. The editorial asks whether human science still has a point, and lands on a modestly hopeful note: interpretation is still a legitimate form of inquiry, and understanding metahuman work still expands human knowledge even if it isn't original discovery.

It reads rather differently now than it did in 2000.