[mbeavitt]

Simulating the real world at increasingly accurate scales is not that useful, because in biology - more than any other field - our assumptions are incorrect/flawed most of the time. The most useful thing simulations allow us to do is directly test those assumptions and in these cases, the simpler the model the better. Jeremy Gunawardena wrote a great piece on this: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007...

[cysteinechapel]

Plenty of simple models in biology that don't model the underlying details provide profoundly generalizable insights across scales. The percolation threshold model explains phase transition behavior from the savanna-forest transition to the complement immune system to epidemics to morphogenesis to social networks.

[kylehotchkiss]

And the extremely difficult, expensive, and often resultless process of confirming/denying these assumptions is one of the greatest uses of tax dollars and university degrees I can think of, yet, the current admin has taken the perspective that it's all Miasma but also cut the EPA, which by their logic, would stop the Miasma