I recently became aware of a strange micro story/poem by Jorge Luis Borges called "On exactitude in Science". Seeing how I've quite recently completed a few courses on scientific modeling, and have also now officially joined a lab dedicated to modeling and understanding complex systems, I found this story to be incredibly witty and think at all scientists (if not all people) would benefit from taking a minute out of their day to read it over.
A map that is the same size of the country which it intends to map is clearly a ludicrous proposition. Yet, in many fields, it seems to be what many people ask for from those who do computational modeling and theory. While I know little about cartography, I do know about biological modeling. And the little bit that I do know is enough to make me plainly see the resistance that people have to any model which attempts to describe a complex system based on a small number of parameters.
In any model, the number of tweaks that can be made to make it a bit more realistic are nearly endless and on the surface, all are equally deserving of being implemented. I say nearly endless, because all models do have an end which occurs when they contain each and every bit of information about the system which they are attempting to explain. But at that point, the model and the subject are one and the same and our map now spans the nation.
Where we define a 'minimal' explanation is of course the great question. Nevertheless, I hope we can all agree that if 90% of a phenomenon can be explained with 5 parameters and it takes another 47 to bring that total to 91%, perhaps our map has begun to outgrow its use. In physics, cross talk between theory and experiment has been instrumental in nearly every major discovery of the last century. On the other hand, in biology, theory is relegated to fringe academic journals and at best one individual per department. I'm not sure why these two fields have such drastically different dynamics, but I am sure that biology has a lot to learn from the physicists in this regard.
