Comment by illiarian
2 years ago
> And then you say gene X causes Y. Why? Dunno.
Now this is definitely naive. Geneticicts definitely look for an explanation why this happened. Does looking for an answer involve randomly turning on and off some stuff? Yes. It doesn't mean scientists don't look for an answer.
As I said. Some do look further. Some do not. For the particular niche of genetics research, most of the time we actually don't, and that's fine, because it's not particularly actionable whereas the base layer understanding of a genetic interaction is helpful for things like personalized medicine.
We don't shit on the scientists that decide to stop searching "wait but why" and instead answer higher level questions. Because... obviously that is not always the appropriate thing to do.
I was gonna say, I've been on experiments where we literally just blasted the shit out of genomes to do the knockouts and then grew up the plants and phenotyped them to compare with the knockouts.
The point is that we know many things as facts that we cannot explain. We may be looking for the explanation but, as of yet, we don't know why many things are as they are (as in the example above).
Actually, LLMs are also a good example. We don't know why chatGPT generates apparently cogent text and answers. What we know is that, if we train it this way and do a bunch of optimizations we get a machine that appears to be thinking or, at least, we can have a decent conversation with it. There are many efforts to explain it (I remember reading recently a paper analysing the GPT3 neuron that determines 'an' vs 'a' in English)
Finally, all science is falsifiable by definition, so, what we think we know now may be be disproven tomorrow.
Emergent properties is one of the places where pure understanding tends to break down under incomprehensibly huge problem space.
For example people have been doing accidental science the start of human agriculture by selective breeding without understanding the mechanics of DNA transfer. And your right Geneticists look for answers and attempt to minimize the size of the problem space in order to attempt to find answer faster, but the staggering number of interactions that can be caused by a single gene expression pretty much require to pick one place to look at with a microscope and ignore everything else going on around it in order to get an answer in a human lifetime.
Though calling it pseudoscience would be insane.