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Maelin comments on Avoid inflationary use of terms - Less Wrong
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Biology is ridden with this right now - terms in immediate danger of inflating into their own universe include:
"sytems biology" "High throughput" "Integrative"
As well of course as the old favourites - "complexity" and "emergence". I'm reminded of Steven Pinkers "euphemistic treadmill". In both cases we have words losing their information content through use - losing meaning in terms of information, and in the latter sense at least gaining in in terms of emotional weight. Maybe there's a general tendency for words to melt out into smears across meaning-space because of the way we learn them by association? After all the process if unbounded should lead you to associate words with everything right?
Which is probably why we have words that don't add any real meaning, such as the word "that" earlier in this sentence.
I agree, those biology terms are really overused and no longer carry any useful meaning. I regret having used "high throughput" in things I wrote a few years ago...
For the most part "systems biology" is just a less overused euphemism for cybernetics, and we all know what happened to that (as I mentioned in another post in this thread).
I had a lecturer teaching genomics who didn't really believe there was such a thing. He told me about a conference he went to in the 90's where dozens of people told him they were "chaoticians".