Coarse-graining vs abstraction and building theory without a grounding

Back in September 2017, Sandy Anderson was tweeting about the mathematical oncology revolution. To which Noel Aherne replied with a thorny observation that “we have been curing cancers for decades with radiation without a full understanding of all the mechanisms”.

This lead to a wide-ranging discussion and clarification of what is meant by terms like mechanism. I had meant to blog about these conversations when they were happening, but the post fell through the cracks and into the long to-write list.

This week, to continue celebrating Rockne et al.’s 2019 Mathematical Oncology Roadmap, I want to revisit this thread.

And not just in cancer. Although my starting example will focus on VEGF and cancer.

I want to focus on a particular point that came up in my discussion with Paul Macklin: what is the difference between coarse-graining and abstraction? In the process, I will argue that if we want to build mechanistic models, we should aim not after explaining new unknown effects but rather focus on effects where we already have great predictive power from simple effective models.

Since Paul and I often have useful disagreements on twitter, hopefully writing about it on TheEGG will also prove useful.