Hmm... I guess I don't understand. My view is that in natural sciences there are so many variables that can act on a given system that you could never truly do

Hmm... I guess I don't understand. My view is that in natural sciences there are so many variables that can act on a given system that you could never truly do isolation testing. However in your scenario, you're saying mutate a "piece of data"? I guess I'm wondering why a piece of data would mutate in the system if it wasn't manipulated by a user?