Equilibration (a bigger concept than certain others like
Boden seem to have credited it) is the answer. The epistemic being has to equilibrate not just the internal structures between themselves, but also with the environment/world/universe. And surely this applies to modern day science as much as thumb sucking.  In other words, it's not just an intrinsic mechanism.

Reciprocal adaptation produces *abstraction* and
*qualitative* advance.  The progress from stages I to III
in sensorimotor development is, cognitively, a qualitative
advance through abstraction. The scientific advance from not
having the human genome mapped, to then having it mapped, is a quantitative advance, not qualitative (I would argue). There are some differences here.

A1:

Chez Piaget, assimilation and accommodation are functional constructs. By this I mean that their specific  interpretation and operationalisation can be fixed only through something else. Chez Piaget, that amounts to a succession of logical - that is, normative - models as models of mental  frameworks that are used and  constructed by humans,

Functioning in terms of a normative framework is something that, on this view, is common to all livings things [an Aristotelian claim].
The particular character true of any living kind is another matter. Think of Darwinian "competition" - how it is similar, and different - in Great White Sharks and Great White Men [and Women too].

A2:

Not having a philosophical background I have arrived at a simple (overly?) view of "Assimilation" and Accommodation". To wit, I think of accommodation as occurring when the responses are primarily driven by the external stimulus input. Conversely, assimilation occurs when the responses are primarily driven by the internal workings of the psychic system. In the latter case, the specifics of the external input are largely irrelevant and the organism is said to be "playing" with the object, i.e., using it for his own intrapsychic purposes. In the former case, the organism is subordinating his own special internal schemas to the external object and he is said to be "imitating" it. Any real life situation obviously falls somewhere between these two poles and is a mixture of assimilation and accommodation. Furthermore, any schema can be executed in either an assimilatory fashion or an accommodator fashion, though in practice it will be some mixture of the two.
  Are these views at all accurate in terms of Piagetian theory?