Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Crunch those numbers...but with caution

"Modeling is fun, sometimes it produces elegant structures, but there is a tendency to reify models. To take them as nature, when really all they are is proposed abstractions of nature. I'm concerned when a literature begins to develop on the models themselves, rather than on nature."

- Dan Simberloff, quoted in David Quammen's Song of the Dodo

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