Complexity and biology

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.