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CasioTheSane 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?
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".