Complexity and biology

May 25th, 2010

Michael White discusses the status quo in modeling complex biological systems:

There is a lot of biology tourism by some computational people who really are doing fact-free science. They are happy if they can successfully use their model to number-crunch some data set (typically the other half of the single dataset they used to train their model); they declare victory and say that their success means that some grand idea (typically untested, if not untestable) that motivated their model has been vindicated.

Read the whole thing.


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  • May 25, 2010 at 9:20 pm Chris Miller
    "There is a lot of biology tourism by some computational people who really are doing fact-free science." --Michael White
  • May 25, 2010 at 9:29 pm Ruchira S. Datta
    Very interesting read, thanks!
  • May 25, 2010 at 9:31 pm Ruchira S. Datta
    He says, "Maybe there are systems that just are really, really complex, in their own unique way, extremely heterogeneous systems whose properties determined primarily by a non-reproducible history." In fact, this is exactly the view taken by C. Dyke in _The Evolutionary Dynamics of Complex Systems: A Study in Biosocial Complexity_ http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=httpwwwruchir-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0195051769
  • May 25, 2010 at 9:32 pm Ruchira S. Datta
    According to Dyke, our view of complex systems must be diachronic, i.e., take their history into account. This ties in well with Dobzhansky's famous dictum "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
  • May 25, 2010 at 9:36 pm Ruchira S. Datta
    So I hope that having started my biological career in the Berkeley Phylogenomics Group, where evolutionary analysis is what we're all about, will keep me from being a biological tourist or a fact-free scientist. We do our best to be as comprehensive as we can in the data we deal with, so hopefully there are some facts in there somewhere!
  • May 25, 2010 at 9:40 pm Ruchira S. Datta
    I commented on the original post asking what he thinks of Martin Nowak's work: http://www.ped.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/
  • May 25, 2010 at 10:30 pm Chris Miller
    I dabble in some modeling-type work myself, so I'm certainly not disparaging the whole field - I'm sure you guys do great stuff. That line spoke to me, though, as a beautiful model is useless if it doesn't reflect the underlying biology.
  • May 26, 2010 at 11:55 am Ruchira S. Datta
    My comment on the original post seems to have disappeared. I'll try once more...

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