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Molecular Biology is authority-driven garbage, or authority-driven perfection

[posted on behalf of CRON4healthyfuture 2006-03-16]

A CRONie's recent logic-talk about "Authority" is actually kind of timely.

There is a recent article in PNAS that discusses how molecular interactions get "discussed" in the literature.

Basically, who ever finds a "place" (molecular interaction) gets to "name" (characterize its phenemonology subjectively) it. Everyone who comes to the party late has to put up with "their rules".

According to their analysis, this way of doing things is going to yield a good data set, or a dataset with a lot of garbage.

I think a lot of the research, in "insulin resistance" and "leptin resistance", for example, is a problem, for instance. Everyone talks in these terms now, but, sometimes it just doesn't "add up".

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http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0600591103v1

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"Furthermore, our computations indicate that our data set can be interpreted in two very different ways (two "alternative universes"): one is an "optimists' universe" with a very low incidence of false results (<5%), and another is a "pessimists' universe" with an extraordinarily high rate of false results (>90%). Our computations deem highly unlikely any milder intermediate explanation between these two extremes."