Abstract
Computational methods have become increasingly prevalent in molecular biology over the last decades. While this development has been met with mixed expectations, everyone appears to agree that we are witnessing a deep transformation of the epistemic and methodological conditions of the life sciences. In this contribution I would like to investigate the influence of computational methods in molecular biology by focusing on the very meaning of the concept of computation. As research in cognitive psychology has revealed, human reasoning can deviate substantially from the model of formal computation. However, computational methods do not necessarily represent an optimized version of informal reasoning. Instead, they are best understood as cognitive tools that can support and extend, but also transform human cognition in unintended ways. To illustrate this perspective, I will discuss a number of contemporary case studies from different areas in computational biology. Even though the influence of computational methods reveals itself in different ways, I suggest that an analysis of computational methods as tools of formal reasoning allows for a meaningful assessment of the differences between human and machine-aided cognition and of how they interact in scientific practice.
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Notes
- 1.
This has to be qualified: sometimes the goal of modeling is precisely to investigate the causal influence of a particular entity by not including it in a model.
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Gross, F. (2020). The Impact of Formal Reasoning in Computational Biology. In: Bertolaso, M., Sterpetti, F. (eds) A Critical Reflection on Automated Science. Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25001-0_7
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