Fern leaves and cauliflower curds are not fractals (2012)
People who are complaining about the article:<p>There&#x27;s this trope about physics and math envy, which I think ultimately boiled down an envy of the funding that physicists received in the cold war (it lead to a lot of equations in Ecology, for instance).<p>But ignoring the reasons for math envy for a moment, there&#x27;s also a push among some of the more computationally inclined to try to explain other sciences using their tools. This has been going on for a least a few decades, with &quot;holographic universe&quot; ideas, Wolfram&#x27;s &quot;New Kind of Science&quot;, and the like, and of course actual computational modeling such as weather models. And conflating a prediction engine with intelligence (like that guy at Google did).<p>It&#x27;s good to show that these reductions, at our current level of computational technology, are not that accurate. &quot;Computational hacking&quot; is really no different from &quot;P-hacking&quot;, in that it is easily abused by the lay audience and scientists who conflate possibly fictitious correlative modeling with reality.<p>The model is not the thing. The P-score is not the thing. Mechanisms are the thing. Mechanisms are the core of science. All else is preliminary, at best.