Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science
David A. Morrison · Systematic Biology · 2009
Computers have always been seen as having the potential to affect science rather strongly, and the application of computer technology to the study of science is now referred to as cyberscience. As the book Systematics as Cyberscience suggests, this applies to systematics as much as to any other scientific discipline. Indeed, I have long claimed that bioinformatics was invented by systematists. Bioinformatics is an idea that originated in the late 1960s, when systematists first started seriously considering the practical application of computer technology to biology, in the form of specimen databases, online identification, and phylogenetic analysis. The widespread application to biology of the advances in information technology was inevitable as computers became cheaper and more powerful. However, the idea of bioinformatics as a separate discipline had to wait for the development of molecular biology in the 1980s, when its full potential was realized in the more mainstream disciplines of biology.