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Original author here - I just discovered this thread. Thanks so much for all the comments! Some context behind why I wrote this post: as a researcher and technologist in biology, I've realized that it's unclear to me what the real questions are; that this lack of clarity is not due to my immaturity; and the field seems dangerously aimless. >99% of the time, work is justified (and finished) with some application to health and medicine, with little regard for theory building or true understanding of a system. Bringing up this point usually solicits two responses: 1) we don't have enough data yet 2) there's little use for theory in biology. I hope I can give more in depth responses where I see these themes in other comments, but I'll generalize my thoughts here. First, how do we judge what questions are worth asking and researching, vs trivial details? How do we even know whether we understand whether a question has been adequately answered? The current state of research to me often seems like John Searle's Chinese Room: we just generate a huge dictionary of perturbation-responses and call this "understanding". This might be effective to find drug targets, but is it real understanding? It might be the first step, but it seems to me that we're swimming in plenty of data already and it's worth it to step back and try to figure out what what it is we are actually trying to do. I'm comfortable with the fact that answers to our questions might be a long ways off, but it's scary that no one seems to care that we don't even know what the questions are. Second, I'd argue biology has historically been very theoretical. We developed a whole quantitative theory of genetics (Fisher, Wright, Haldane, ...) before we had identified what a gene actually was. Hell, it was still debated what matter even looked like at that the microscale (where we knew genes must exist)! In the advent of molecular biology, Watson, Crick, Brenner, Gamow, Delbruck, et al, predicted through (some) experiments but mostly reasoning and conjecture much of what was later found to be true about transcription/translation. There are countless other examples of where theory has driven the study of the origin of life, molecular biology, ecology, et cetera. Only recently, when health science started to dominate biological research, did biology become less theoretical and more focused on individual instances of problems. tl;dr - What's most scary is that we don't even know what the foundational questions are anymore for modern biology, and no one seems to even care. Rather than focusing on clearly stated foundations, the field is guided by the latest trends in glamour journals, which tend to obfuscate questions rather than answer them. |