Modelling competition

Abstract

All scientific knowledge can be thought of as a model of reality, a model which is continually updated as new information accumulates. Generally the word model is used in a narrower sense to mean a mathematical or graphical description of some aspect of nature. There is a great deal of confusion surrounding the value and application of models, largely because models are constructed for different reasons, and a model constructed for one purpose cannot always be used for another.

...he was very sorry to part with his sheep, which he left with the Academy of Sciences of Bordeaux, which offered as the subject of the prize of that year the question why the wool of this sheep was red; and the prize was awarded to a scholar from the North, who demonstrated by A plus B, minus C, divided by Z, that the sheep must be red and die of scab. Voltaire (1759)

To construct appropriate mathematical models of ecological processes, is, of course, only one half of an ecologist’s labours. No less important is their testing, but the matter seems to get much less than half of most workers’ attention. E. C. Pielou (1972)

Of course there are good models of the world and bad ones, and even the good ones are only approximations. R. Dawkins (1976)