The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it. There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
(I’ve already done a little of this, or tried to, last summer. It worked pretty well.)
