Enough about simple!

One of the goals of my research program is to bring modern biology into the models we use to manage our waterbodies. When learning about the science in a certain area I am always impressed by how much we know about certain topics. On the other hand I feel that there is an obsession with finding simple solutions to complex systems, which limits the utility of biological research. In this blog post at “On Biology” I argue that biologists should be more like modern car mechanics and delegate understanding (not just number crunching) to computers.

Regular visitors to this blog may realize I am a bit on a crusade here. I have been writing papers criticising our community (of ecosystem modelers) with titles “100 Years since Streeter and Phelps: It Is Time To Update the Biology in Our Water Quality Models” and “75 years since Monod: it is time to increase the complexity of our predictive ecosystem models” and now “Biology 2.0: It is time to delegate understanding to computers”. And I am writing another one as we speak. I guess it is a phase I am going through...

BLOG POST LINK
http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-biology/2017/03/16/biology-2-0-it-is-time-to-delegate-understanding-to-computers/

SASM HOMEPAGE (hasn’t been updated for a while)
http://www.systemsbioecology.org/sasm.htm

www.systemsbioecology.org