Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA14821 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 22 Mar 2001 14:36:58 GMT Message-ID: <3ABA0D52.2F25FE03@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 14:33:54 +0000 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Demise of a Meme References: <20010322122152.AAA13805@camailp.harvard.edu@[205.240.180.87]> <20010322134110.B577@reborntechnology.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Observation without theory doesn't come within
> a million miles of being scientific.
It's interesting though (and this is an aside, not a comment on the main
thrust) round where I am, there's a lot of this genome-wide gene
expression data washing about, with people essentially fishing for
interesting stuff and only then coming up with a theory to take account
of it (if at all - all the big pharmers want is more drug targets to
treat [not cure] illness, but perhaps they're more engineers than
scientists). Rest assured that this industrial-scale arse-first approach
is not without critics, but I think observation (in a less focused form)
does predate theory formation in scientific investigation (although the
two are both required obviously, otherwise you just have
superstition/religion).
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Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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