Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Physics is filled with papers where the authors don't actually do anything—at least not anything empirical. Instead, they explore the math behind a topic and try to gain new theoretical insights, leaving it to someone else to find out whether their insights are actually reflected in the behavior of the real world.
But physics doesn't have a monopoly on this, and there have been plenty of papers in biology that are filled with math and explore how a theoretical population would behave. One area where that's had a big impact on thinking has been in studying the origin of life, where researchers have been struggling to understand how a set of simple self-copying molecules could make their way towards something that looks more like a cell. Now, two Japanese researchers have taken some of these theoretical ideas and shown they can hold in an actual biochemical system.
[...] But if simulations identified the problem, they've also helped us identify a potential solution: cells. By dividing up a large population of self-replicating molecules, cells increase the odds that that some of the small, divided populations will replicate without any disabling mutations. Because each cell is competing against all the others, the ones that are able to go on replicating will eventually outcompete their peers.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/researchers-get-two-rna-molecules-to-cooperate-evolve/
(Score: 1, Informative) by aristarchus on Sunday September 09 2018, @11:09AM (4 children)
Just think, we could have had a real aristarchus submission instead of this piece about stimulation and its discontents. That said, modelling has its uses. For instance, if you wanted to suggest that planets orbit in ellipses, around the Sun, rather than the Sun moving around the Earth, some mathematics could be very revealing.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday September 09 2018, @12:10PM
There's a middle ground here. We could have both. Alas, a certain 2000 year old would-be philosopher has been submitting crap for the past year or so. Only he can fix that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @09:57PM (2 children)
Actually, technically speaking, the sun and the earth orbit each other. It's just that the earth moves a whole lot more because it has a lot less inertia.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Sunday September 09 2018, @11:00PM (1 child)
Thus the ellipse. Theoretical biology, however, is an entirely different matter. Kind of a darker matter, one that attracts Spencerians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @12:13AM
There's no such thing as theoretical biology, it's either math or garbage. More likely the second.