Biology is what you study, not how you study

Chad's response to Dave Ng's meme attempt asking people about their own field and relationship to other fields included this:

I'm particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be statistical. Clean and unambiguous results are rare, and that would drive me absolutely crazy. They're one small step removed from social science.

Chad admitted in the comments that he was just trying to foment some conflict for entertainment value. But I'll bite because this is a "teachable moment." The comment about social science seems very similar to what James D. Watson (of Watson & Crick) said to E.O. Wilson during the 1960s during their conflicts about the relevance of organismic biology in the DNA world:

"There is only one science: physics. Everything else is social work."

Watson was trained as an ornithologist, so he knew whereof he spoke. For him, and a whole generation of biologists in the wake of the DNA revolution, the only real biology was molecular biology, which attempted to replicate physics' success with bottom-up reductionism. Biology is a topic of study, but there is a world of difference between an empirical biochemist whose career is devoted to the elucidation of one particular metabolic pathway and the theoretical evolutionary biologist who looks at the whole tree of life as possible illustrations of evolutionary processes. Mechanistically oriented molecular geneticists and population geneticists are both subdivisions of genetics, but their starting points are radically different. Consider for example the issue of epistasis, roughly, gene-to-gene interactions.

The graph to the left charts the impact of statistical or fitness value epistasis, which is the sort of thing evolutionary biologists are interested in. In contrast, molecular geneticists are interested in mechanistic or functional epistasis. Instead of focusing on the variation generated by the impact of gene-to-gene interactions (i.e., violation of the interlocus independence assumption at the heart of the evolutionary genetics which descends from R.A. Fisher), molecular biologists are interested in the specific and deterministic interactions which are fixed within a species and exhibit no variation. Evolutionary biologists generate a reification which capture the dymamics while molecular biologists are interested in the concrete physical process by which genes influence, modulate and regulate each other. Throwing these two groups into the same bag does confuses the issue and masks the complementary methodologies which different biological fields employ.

In any case, though Chad's jabs are aimed at non-molecular biologists whether he knows it or not, I am not sure he would trade the enormous error bars within statistical fields for the ubiquitous reliance on verbal models which seems the norm in much of molecular biology. Consider what David Haig, an evolutionary theorist, stated a few years back in a Q & A series:

3) Do you believe most biologists, even evolutionary biologists, appreciate formal theory?

Most biologists do not appreciate formal theory. Theory is more respected by evolutionary biologists as a group.