Re:People have no idea which sciences are robust
by xaa on Sunday March 05, 2017 @12:01PM
(#13796930)
> just to come up with the most simplistic model
Yeap. Bioinformatician here. Not only are most published models overly simplistic -- which everyone acknowledges -- but I think our bigger problem is we don't even have a reasonable "meta-model" of biology.
What I mean by that is, imagine experiments were instantaneous and free. How would we then incorporate the results into a mathematical/computational/predictive framework that describes biological reality in a way analogous to physics? AFAIK, we haven't the foggiest clue.
Biology is pretty theory-light and empiricism-heavy, probably because we have good results with things like "I dunno what this mold is secreting, but it seems to be killing the bacteria!"
So our experimental results are pretty precise (although arguably not "robust" between strains/conditions/etc), when people bother to use n>3, but the models and theory are anything but.
Yeap. Bioinformatician here. Not only are most published models overly simplistic -- which everyone acknowledges -- but I think our bigger problem is we don't even have a reasonable "meta-model" of biology.
What I mean by that is, imagine experiments were instantaneous and free. How would we then incorporate the results into a mathematical/computational/predictive framework that describes biological reality in a way analogous to physics? AFAIK, we haven't the foggiest clue.
Biology is pretty theory-light and empiricism-heavy, probably because we have good results with things like "I dunno what this mold is secreting, but it seems to be killing the bacteria!"
So our experimental results are pretty precise (although arguably not "robust" between strains/conditions/etc), when people bother to use n>3, but the models and theory are anything but.