Teaser
“While we do not necessarily need strictly hypothesis-driven investigation, thoughtful, curiosity-driven research is a must. If we continue the way we are currently going, we run the danger of ending up with massive mountains of big data that nobody can interpret. Systems biology should not reinforce this trend, but rather provide new ways for making sense of life. What we need is a more balanced combination of theory and experimental practice, and more adequate communication between them. The philosophy of biology should certainly be of help in this context. Philosophers and theoreticians have made important contributions to highlight the importance of theory in disciplines where it is generally underrated. Unfortunately, the message is all too rarely heard within the community of experimental biologists. In my view, this must change if systems biology is to achieve its true potential.”
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Notes
- 1.
I think it’s difficult to overestimate how far ahead of their time John Reinitz, with associates Eric Mjolsness and David H. Sharp, were when developing their connectionist modeling approach in the early 1990s. Doing this sort of science was not at all fashionable at the time. In fact, it was considered to be impossible and outright crazy.
- 2.
Although it was still not commonly called that in the early 2000s. We were doing “functional genomics”.
- 3.
Greek and modern atomism, the fundamental particles of physics, or genes as particulate carriers of inherited character traits come to mind.
- 4.
One is reminded of NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy that managed to crash space probes into Mars at an ever increasing frequency. This notion of efficiency (and its implied expectation of a free lunch) shows remarkable similarities to the situation in science today. The effects will be predictably and depressingly similar as well.
- 5.
Rescher (1996) points out that if you could predict future scientific discoveries, you would already have made them!
- 6.
Think of the laser, positrons, or thermophilic enzymes, all discovered serendipitously by scientists unconcerned with their potential applications, which took decades to have their massive scientific, technological and/or societal impact.
- 7.
The notion of “causal-mechanistic explanation” used here is somewhat similar to the neo-mechanical philosophy of science, but with a stronger emphasis on dynamics and explicit formulation in mathematical terms (see Jaeger and Sharpe 2014 for details).
- 8.
It is important to stress that other disciplines within the life sciences, such as physiology, evolutionary biology, or neuroscience, exhibit a much more mature balance between theoretical and experimental work.
- 9.
This work also resulted in the only Nobel Prizes that systems biologists have won so far.
- 10.
Understanding goes beyond being able to simulate a process. We want to avoid the kind of systems biology that replaces a complex biological system that we do not understand with a complex computational system that we do not understand.
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Suggested Readings by Johannes Jaeger
Green, S., Fagan, M., & Jaeger, J. (2015). Explanatory integration challenges in evolutionary systems biology. Biological Theory, 10, 18–35.
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Jaeger, J., & Monk, N. (2015). Everything flows: A process perspective on life. EMBO Reports, 16, 1064–1067.
Acknowledgments
I thank Anton Crombach, Hilde Janssens, Nick Monk, James Sharpe, Berta Verd and Adam Wilkins for inspiring discussions and/or useful feedback on this manuscript.
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Jaeger, J. (2017). The Importance of Being Dynamic: Systems Biology Beyond the Hairball. In: Green, S. (eds) Philosophy of Systems Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47000-9_13
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