Maybe it’s that I don’t grok what the author means by “formal description” but I don’t see how that really touches on it. As a layman the impression I got from

Maybe it’s that I don’t grok what the author means by “formal description” but I don’t see how that really touches on it. As a layman the impression I got from the article is “biologists are doing the wrong things to learn about cells, I think they should be doing this other thing instead” whereas the impression I have from what I’ve read about those learning processes is that the learning is so hard that biologists are literally just doing whatever they can come up with to learn anything at all. They didn’t choose these processes because of what they wanted to learn, they literally invented those processes because it was what they could come up with (pretty ingeniously, too), there are no alternatives until those are invented and they would be ecstatic to use them as well. I probably have a disconnect from my lack of knowledge. An example would help; if it’s in the radio analogy I’ve lost it by the orders of magnitude difference in merely observing it at all.