Research: Theory, models and biology

Theoretical biology seems to be the black sheep of both the wet-lab biology and simulation communities, a situation that I wish were different, but honestly it can be difficult to make a compelling case for the role/yield of theory in biology beyond a few simple models and natural selection etc.

It's frustrating, because I think the most fruitful area we can work on is developing a better understanding / mathematical formulation of the incredibly high dimensional, nonlinear, stochastic spaces that biological systems live in, but it's difficult to see the way forward because no on (that I know of) is putting time into thinking about it.