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by danieltillett 4187 days ago
Unfortunately biologist have been taken for a ride many times by people selling mathematical snake-oil. For example, the whole field of DNA microarrays [1] turned out to be an illusion woven out of applying complex statistical tools to "vast amount of unstructured, unprocessed data". There really is no way you can gain real understanding from poorly designed and unrepeatable experiments by apply obscure mathematical tools.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_microarray

1 comments

Luckily, complex numbers and polynomials are not snake oil.