Beagle - 3:21 am on Jul 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.

Gee, that's really useful. How does it help a suicidal teenager to know that "people do it" and we don't even care why? So this is the "point"?

The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws...

I first studied genetics in the days when it was pure statistics because there was no way to see inside the human chromosome. Even then, we knew it really wasn't that simple. I'm now working in cancer genetics research in the days of epigenetics and SNPs and we still know it's not that simple. Sure, new data changes the way research is done; the 80-year-old doctor I work with is hanging for dear life onto "linkage studies" (put simply, someone with trait A is more likely to have trait B than is supported by chance, so the genes controlling the two traits are likely to be relatively close to each other), when SNPs can identify the genetic source of disease so much faster and more efficiently that it hardly bears talking about. But SNPs have to be "made" by humans working in labs - humans who still have a lot of things to figure out. Yes, the human genome has been sequenced, but that means we've learned the alphabet - it doesn't mean we know how to read everything it says.
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Speaking of the human genome, a disclaimer here that, as someone who thinks science is helped by people sharing their research results, I have no love lost on Venter. I'll choose Francis Collins to be in charge of my genome, thank you:

Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology...... By analyzing [data] with Google-quality computing resources, though, Venter has advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation.

Collecting "statistical blips" is okay, but if it stops there, what advancement has it performed? If other scientists take his data and run with it, and actually learn something about the species he's found evidence of, that's when biology will be advanced. To say that Venter has "advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation" is... well, it's a lot of things, most of which I can't say here.

Of course, you can ask anyone who uses AdWords or who tries to produce good SEO about the definition of "Google quality." Is that really what you want your doctor to base his treatment decisions on?
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Once a week or so, I change the quote I have hanging on my office door. One of my favorites is from Isaac Asimov (who actually wrote a lot more scientific books than he did science fiction):