Comments on an interesting Wired Article

Chris Anderson has written an interesting article. While the title is rather placative ("The End of Thery") there are some thoughts worth beeing mentioned.

First "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them". True, so true: models are just that: models. Also nothing against succeeding without them: data mining can be made without models.

But: is the Peta-Age really the end of theories? Interestingly, the article mentioned Craig Venters huge task to "sequence the air". This creates vast amounts data, and makes it almost ridiculously simple to find new species, or make correlations between species. To analyse this, to explain and understand it, there needs to be a model. Or doesn't it?

There is absolute nothing against the idea to look for unexpected correlations in huge datasets. But to make it really scientific, results or rather conclusions out of those results need to be falsificable. This falsification cannot be done in the dataset beeing used, but in a larger context. In a model, extrapolated from the dataset.

All mho...