[ossicones]

The excellent new book, "Modeling Social Behavior" by Paul Smaldino, starts with a quote from Jakob von Uexküll that I've abbreviated a bit here:

"An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. [...] In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science."

I appreciated how this quote emphasizes that science and modeling are inextricably connected.