Software vs. Wetware

[Dorothee Guenzel]

On 21 Jun 1995 17:11:38 GMT, Matt Jones wrote:

>If we knew
>100% how anything in biology worked, then we could stop doing "wet"
>experiments on it, and just play around with the model instead. I don't
>think this is the case, though. Probably, the most useful thing about
>modeling is that when a model *doesn't* reproduce a particular "wet"
>result, it tells us where there's a hole in our understanding that we
>need to fix by doing more experiments and refining the model.

Another advantage of models I can see is, if there are have two different 
hypothesis' for one finding. It may then be possible to  model both and 
then try to drive the parameters of the two models to their extremes. 
Once the results from both models start to differ significantly one can 
use these parameters in further "wet" experiments as a testable base 
for the two original hypothesis'. 

Dorothee Guenzel