Problems in Mathematizing Systems Biology

“I think biology stands out as a discipline in which there has been a wild flowering of interdisciplinary approaches – bioinformatics, for example, and applications of informational visualization. This flowering has not kept pace with our understanding. For example, there is a small industry devoted to creating visualization tools for biologists. One of the prominent standards for assessing whether these tools perform well is whether using the tools facilitates insight; but there remains conceptual confusion within the info-vis community about just what counts as an insight, about how to measure or even count insights, and about whether insight is the proper standard for success as opposed to, say, some speed-related standard. This is just the sort of issue for which philosophers of science, and maybe even some epistemologists, are especially well equipped to address.”