Chris Anderson, you are wrong
June 25, 2008
Chris Anderson is a man I respect and Wired a magazine I like most of the time. During my chat with Jon Udell, I had bemoaned the gap between science and the general public, and Anderson’s latest article on Wired only serves as a reinforcement of that frustration. In an article entitled The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obselete he writes about how the petabyte era is going to change science has one thing very right, and one thing very wrong. He is write more is not more. It is different. But more does not mean the end of the scientific method. I would argue that it allows us to think about new ways to apply the scientific method to try and solve problems.
Biology has changed a lot since the 70s, and its not just genetics. The very field has been turned around on its head. What does that mean? It means new methods, new techniques. The human and other genomes, high throughput structure prediction, more data points, might lead to a lot of confusion at first as we try and apply our old methods to new problems and data types, but it also leads to the creation of new techniques, our ability to tap into all this data, to build better models which can help describe what we know. It’s always a moving target. How can we develop better, more refined models that explain all kinds of phenomena. I am a life scientist (although with a physical sciences background). I have spent the better part of the last two years evangelizing “what science can learn from Google”, but I don’t see this as science under threat. I see this as opportunity. How can I (or others who actually still do science) take the new paradigms of computing (by the way, bioinformaticians have been using methods typically used in “collective intelligence” for years), and take biology, which is now very much a digital science, and combine them with our scientific reasoning, our ability to take phenomena and develop models that explain those phenomena and do something meaningful with them. I have seen many computer scientists develop some very elegant theoretical models for biological information, but often without any biological context. Yes scientists need to adopt new techniques, develop new theoretical approaches, even rethink the very basic tenets that they know, but to say the scientific method is dead or approaching the end is sensationalist in the least, and completely uneducated in the extreme. Having to use those words for an article pen by someone whose writing I admire hurts, but science is not a game of hype. It’s hard, and all the easy problems have been solved.
Footnote: We are barely tapping into quantum theory to solve life science problems. Most of our methods to look at protein structure and dynamics, to look at drug-protein interactions are either rule-based or Newtonian in nature, with quantum mechanics providing many of the parameters. So lets not put the cart before the horse, at least in the life sciences. I am sure the physicists are trying to develop new theories. That only means physics is very and truly alive. I wonder if people said science was dead when Schrodinger gave the world his equation.
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Computing, Science
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