only we could go back and ask Wright’s contemporaries, “Why didn’t you pay attention?” Crow suggests one reason: path analysis “doesn’t lend itself to ‘canned’ programs. The user has to have a hypothesis and must devise an appropriate diagram of multiple causal sequences.” Indeed, Crow put his finger on an essential point: path analysis requires scientific thinking, as does every exercise in causal inference. Statistics, as frequently practiced, discourages it and encourages “canned” procedures instead. Scientists will always prefer routine calculations on data to methods that challenge their
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Exactly!! This is the massive problem with Bioinformatics, as opposed to being a filled to help us discover novel biology through the use of proper, interpretable models of biology, instead we have 'canned' 'tools' which are suppose to spit out an answer, when nothing could be further from the truth!! One must mould the solution to the problem!!!
