In silico veritas

Abstract

Literacy underpins constitutions, civil rights and liberties. But E‐mail is replacing the letter; the digital certificate, the written signature. Printing allows the recording and dissemination of observations, thoughts and ideas. But the Internet is competing with the printed page; the searchable database with the index of contents. If you are reading this article online, you may have retrieved the file because a search engine found a match to your query, indicating that there is something here you may wish to know. A contextual, semantic search will further confirm this and distil the essence of this article. Searching a genome database is exactly the same. Just as computers are transforming the way we communicate and store information, they are changing the way we discover things worth communicating. In the future, automated discovery will generate new knowledge, take over the process of doing science itself, and tell us what it is that we need to know and understand. The search engines may, by now, be satisfied with this decoy. So, for those who read beyond titles and first paragraphs: do not believe a word of what you have read so far. The title of this article is irony and its introduction parody. But they describe an attitude that seems to be gaining ground within the scientific community, namely that computers can do our thinking for us. I do not share this view. I rather think that excellent and exciting science is being done today by people who depend totally on computers, but that many are mistaken about the computers’ role in doing science. My aim is neither to criticize this science, nor the reliance on computers in research, but I claim that knowledge does not arise de novo from computer‐assisted analysis of biological data. Computers dazzle and entertain us, but we should …