From "The End of Theory over at Wired

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Do we need scientific thinking at all anymore? If biology is any indication, the answer is clearly no. For about 10 years now, researchers have used microarray and other high throughput data, together with support vector machines, neural networks, and other machine learning techniques to model what's really going on in the cell. Some of this has been useful, but often it's just a start - directed, hypothesis driven science, based perhaps on ideas generated by these supercrunching analyses, is still needed to really nail things down. Without that, you get hundreds of rehashes of the same high-throughput data, with very little progress. Even in areas where super crunching is much more successful at prediction, the goal of science is not simply prediction - it's understanding, explanation. We may be able to predict things well with lots of data and black box algorithms, but that doesn't mean we understand them.