Heuristic models as inspiration-for and falsifiers-of abstractions

Last month, I blogged about abstraction and lamented that abstract models are lacking in biology. Here, I want to return to this.

What isn’t lacking in biology — and what I also work on — is simulation and heuristic models. These can seem abstract in the colloquial sense but are not very abstract for a computer scientist. They are usually more idealizations than abstractions. And even if all I care about is abstract models — which I can reasonably be accused of at times — then heuristic models should still be important to me. Heuristics help abstractions in two ways: portfolios of heuristic models can inspire abstractions, and single heuristic models can falsify abstractions.

In this post, I want to briefly discuss these two uses for heuristic models. In the process, I will try to make it a bit more clear as to what I mean by a heuristic model. I will do this with metaphors. So I’ll produce a heuristic model of heuristic models. And I’ll use spatial structure and the evolution of cooperation as a case study.