Abstract
The generation and testing of hypotheses is widely considered to be the primary method by which Science progresses. So much so, that it is still common to find a scientific proposal or an intellectual argument damned on the grounds that “it has no hypothesis being tested”, “it is merely a fishing expedition”, and so on. Extreme versions run “if there is no hypothesis, it is not Science”, the clear implication being that hypothesis-driven programmes (as opposed to data-driven studies) are the only contributor to the scientific endeavour. This misrepresents how knowledge and understanding are actually generated from the study of natural phenomena and laboratory experiments. Hypothesis-driven and inductive modes of reasoning are not competitive, but complementary, and both are required in post-genomic biology.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Oliver, S. (2004). Systems Biology: A New Challenge for ILP. In: Camacho, R., King, R., Srinivasan, A. (eds) Inductive Logic Programming. ILP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3194. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30109-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30109-7_4
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