Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)

New Books in Sociology · Jul 27, 2018 · 41m

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they appeal to a general consensus that the acceleration of data collection through computing technologies requires a parallel shift toward computational thinking. This raises the question, however, of how computational practices have changed over the last few decades…