β Scribed by Harold Morowitz
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
he recent outpouring of data such as gene sequences for a number of organisms including humans is stimulating a growing activity called data base mining. Two of the forms that this data takes may be designated Baconian and Popperian.
The first is named for Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a prescriptive philosopher of science who advocated collecting data and following the path of induction from data to general principles. He was suspicious of logic and a priori formulation of the laws of nature. He felt that he was breaking with his predecessors, and he was indeed at odds with the scholastics. The empiricism that came from his approach resonated through English philosophy for hundreds of years.
The second approach, due to the twentieth century philosopher Karl Popper, starts deeply within the structure of logic and begins with arguments against induction. He asserts that induction can never prove anything because one negative instance will take precedence over any number of positive examples. He suggests that to be "empirical" a theory must at least in principle be vulnerable to an experiment that disproves it. Science then consists of those empirical theories that have thus far survived testing. Science is thus subject to change with each new experiment, particularly those that take us into new domains of observation.
Consider two large-scale databases and two classes of study that they relate to (1) the human genome sequence and the study of the physiological operations of humans, and (2) the Beilstein database of organic compounds and the understanding of cellular metabolism. The emergence approach is to say that the data base entries are agents and we need a set of rules to understand their possible interactions. We then require a set of
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