[cellml-discussion] from Wired: "The end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete"

James Lawson j.lawson at auckland.ac.nz
Wed Jun 25 09:27:43 NZST 2008


Hi all,

Thought I'd see what you guys and girls think of this article, and its 
relevance to CellML, systems biology etc.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics 
replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every 
theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget 
taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they 
do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with 
unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

Some of my thoughts: when we have bioinformatics servers processing 
similar amounts of information to the Google servers, then we'll need to 
rethink how we do things. The question is, how long will that be? And is 
information that encodes a model more useful than information that just 
codes data, considering that the model can produce more information?

Kind regards,
James
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