document: Reply to Carreira-Perpinan and Goodhill -LSB- mathematics in biology -RSB- In a paper by Carreira-Perpinan and Goodhill -LRB- see ibid. , vol .14 , no. 7 , p.1545-60 , 2002 -RRB- the authors apply mathematical arguments to biology . Swindale et al. think it is inappropriate to apply the standards of proof required in mathematics to the acceptance or rejection of scientific hypotheses . To give some examples , showing that data are well described by a linear model does not rule out an infinity of other possible models that might give better descriptions of the data . Proving in a mathematical sense that the linear model was correct would require ruling out all other possible models , a hopeless task . Similarly , to demonstrate that two DNA samples come from the same individual , it is sufficient to show a match between only a few regions of the genome , even though there remains a very large number of additional comparisons that could be done , any one of which might potentially disprove the match . This is unacceptable in mathematics , but in the real world , it is a perfectly reasonable basis for belief
doc_bio_tags: O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
extractive_keyphrases: mathematical arguments biology scientific hypotheses linear model dna genome
abstractive_keyphrases: hypothesis testing cortical maps neural nets