With growing publish-or-perish culture it's becoming increasingly difficult to publish so-called "negative results". I've experienced this personally (see link), and here I want to share some thoughts. In short: I think its lethal for science reliability. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.6659

Cumulative science, unarguably the best tool we have to understand reality, is based on weighting reproducible evidence for and against a given hypothesis. Our understanding on how nature works depends entirely on an unbiased accumulation of both kinds of evidence.

Unfortunately, science is made by humans (or sometimes, human-resembling beings), which are often constrained in their thinking by a plethora of unconscious cognitive biases. Our only defence is to learn about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Confirmation bias (the tendency to favour interpetations that favour one's preconceived ideas), together with our natural appeal towards creative fit-for-all explanations are especially harmful to science.

The mechanism is rather simple: an enticing empirically-supported idea gets published. The authors discuss its possible extrapolation in other contexts and cognitive biases in science-makers now take control. A publication bias against contrasting evidence is established.

An extreme example: did you know that the symbiotic tooth-picking relationship between nile crocodiles and Egyptian plover birds, with which we are all familiar, is simply not true? The history of Mendelian genetics offers a more serious example of the same phenomenon.

The real danger of this is that it promotes the build-up of "echo chambers" by which appealing ideas benefit either from author self-censorship or the fierce resistence of both editors and reviewers against contasting evidence, thus distorting the process of cumulative science

Regarding lizard colour polymorphism, my opinion is not that the morphs are completely devoid of biological significance, but that we need to consider other ideas besides their possible role in social interactions. Sensory ecology and spatio-temporally varying selection look good

We need to encourage researchers and especially editors to publish papers based on their methodology, not their results, as only this way we can ensure a decent progress toward a better understanding of reality.

I will conclude this lenghty thread with a quote from the wise @RGarcia_Roa . Don't be afraid to get cited after a "but see ...", it's a punk thing you can later brag about!