Word of caution

The famous saying “all models are wrong, but some are useful”, often attributed to the British statistician George E. P. Box, captures the hard truth about mathematical modelling that while models are powerful tools, their reliability depends on the assumptions they are built on. As these assumptions arise from our own, limited understanding of the world, no model can perfectly capture a biological phenomenon, it can however help us get closer to the truth.

As pharmacologist and Nobel Prize winner James Black noted, models are “accurate descriptions of our pathetic thinking” (discussed in detail in Gunawardena et al, 2014). It’s important to remember that conclusions drawn from models are only as accurate as the assumptions they rest on.

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