 One of the more influential ideas in philosophy of science is that of robustness. Originally, the term was introduced to denote a certain property of theoretical models, namely insensitivity to modeling assumptions. A robust result in theoretical modeling is a result that is invariant with respect to variations in modeling assumptions (Levins 1966; Wimsatt 1981; Weisberg 2006). In experimental science, the term means something else, namely that a result is invariant with respect to the use of different experimental methods. Robust experimental results are results that somehow agree even although they have been produced by independent methods. The independence of methods can mean at least two things: First, the methods use different physical processes. For example, a light microscope and a (transmission) electron microscope are independent methods in this sense; the former uses visible light, the latter an electron beam to gather information about biological structures. The second sense of independence concerns the theoretical assumptions used to analyze and interpret the data (most data are theory-dependent). If these assumptions are different for the two methods, they are also referred to as independent, or as independently theory-dependent (Culp 1995). These two senses of “independent” usually coincide, although there could be exceptions.