Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Knowledge/
ideas by hypothesis
DEDUCTION
INDUCTION
OBSERVATIONS/
DATA
DEDUCTION
Knowledge/
ideas by hypothesis
INDUCTION
OBSERVATIONS/
DATA
DEDUCTION
Knowledge/
ideas by hypothesis
INDUCTION
OBSERVATIONS/
DATA
DEDUCTION
Underlying theory
(physics, chemistry)
Figure 4
The advancement of Science and of Systems biology as a spiral.
Since the hypotheses are (hopefully) not the same at each turn of the cycle of Fig. 3, one may
also or better view the iterative interplay between the elements of Fig. 3 in terms of a spiral.
in an explicit sense causal. This is not to say that this activity is not extremely
useful, however, since observations of correlations between the transcriptome
of tumours and their response to chemotherapy may help therapy tremendously,
long before any mechanistic basis for understanding (and one might comment
that this is widely true in medicine).
Functional genomics does become part of the science of systems biology when
it makes the step of induction of Fig. 3. In practice, this has not yet happened very
often. It seems important to redress the balance by transforming this empiricism
into a principled hypothesis-generating arc that leads from data to knowledge.
One way in which this can be done is to map the mRNA concentrations that vary
coordinately onto the known regulatory maps of cell biology. Perhaps this leads
to the recognition of coherent regulation of a pathway, or of a limited number
of super-regulators. Either result would lead to a hypothesis which could then
be tested further.
The deductive mode of reasoning is a classical obsession of biology, and
remains entirely relevant. In the present context, it ranges from branches of
