I found the following quote interesting...
article entitled "First Kill the Babies", Carl Zimmer writes regarding
the work of Sarah Hrdy regarding the model she was putting together
about why some animals kill their infants and young:
(emphasis added)
"She often describes her job as creating "imaginary worlds" that other
scientists can then explore to see if they can help us understand the
real one. "I see scientists working in different phases. Some people are
better at one phase than the other. Theoreticians think of other people
as technicians; technicians think of theoreticians as people in outer
space, not connected to the real world. But for the whole process, you
need these phases, and in the initial phase, you're selecting a project,
YOU'RE COMING UP WITH ASSUMPTIONS, you're trying to model WHAT MIGHT BE
TRUE and to generate the hypotheses that you want to look at. Then you
have the actual collection of data and all the methodologies that go
into that. Imaginary worlds have a place in science.""
Hrdy is refreshingly honest. With the right selection of assumptions and
methodology, one can develop an imaginary world.
Paul Durham