The Map is NOT the Territory

I know very little about Alfred Korzybski, and even less about general semantics for which he is famous. I do, however, know his most famous quote: "The map is not the territory". So it is with complete academic ignorance that I co-opt the term for use in the world of biology. You've been warned.

Here's the idea, as I conceive it. You have a map. You have a model. You have a theory. Your theory is awesome, beautiful, exciting and entrancing. Let's say it's string-theory. Let's say it's relativity. Let's say it's evolution. Whatever.

This thing you have, this idea, it's a map. It's a guide to something. It's a flat piece of paper that represents and distills something about reality. It is not its own reality. It is not its own truth. It's serenity is not the same as the actual cold hard truth of the thing that it describes.

In the case of a map, like the kind you hang on your wall, this is obvious. No one is lining up troops to defend the borders on the map in the atlas on your coffee table. They are lining up to defend the real borders of the real states on the real rivers of the real earth.

But in the ivory tower there is a proneness to confusion. String theory, perhaps the best example I can think of, is lauded for its elegance and seeming brilliance. Few people could imagine an explanation for the complexity of quantum physics and relativity in a set of dimensions coiled down so small that they cannot be perceived at our scale of life. It is an impressive theory.

Where is the territory to go with it? String theory has yet to make a single testable prediction. Its details are so arcane that those who study it seem to inevitably be lost in its folded dimensions, content to treat the theory a platonic ideal to which the universe we live in might aspire to reach.



The map exists in service of those who live in the territory. Our theories exist in service of our abilities to make predictions and interact with our world. We draw Australia into our map because it helps us to make predictions about the consequences of certain actions (e.g. hey, I wonder what will happen if I sail South from Indonesia).

In Biology we are plagued by pseudo-predictive models. We spend a lot of time flailing around trying to come up with "mechanism" to explain our observations. We often find that we can come up with two or three. Sometimes we bother to test the predictions that our hypothetical mechanism would imply. Too much of the time the data show muddled and confusing support. We often pick and choose the experiments we want to perform that seem to bolster our point, and dig in for the academic fight over the arcana we've brought into the world.

In the end, the mechanism doesn't mater. The elegance of our theory doesn't matter. We can fight over the lines on the map until Armageddon, but what matters is whether we've done something positive in the real world. This should be completely obvious, but I am shocked at how quickly I am loosing touch with that simple fact. Keep your wits about you, and tuck Korzybski's saying in the back of your mind.