Utterly terrible argument. You could just as easily claim social media or touchscreens or episodes of Modern Family or literally anything else has lead to this increase.
Why would someone do an experiment without a theory to test? How would they know that a particular result was interesting without a theory about the expected result?
You can't even observe something without theories. For example:
- I need to observe here and not anywhere else
- I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly
- Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y
- etc
Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.
I wouldn't disparage that method of discovery at all. But some of the theories required to do it are:
- Many brute-force combinations of these specific organic molecules will yield interesting results (this is the main hypothesis of the experiment)
- We don't need to include the molecules that we haven't included
- We have good criteria for determining what results are interesting
- Our instruments/methods of phenotype prediction are well-understood and working as expected
Once the experiment is run, the observations are meaningless unless interpreted in the context of whatever prevailing theories the scientists have in mind.
Which properties to check? Why that sample and not countless others? Why not spend the rest of his life checking different properties of the one sample?
Can you tell me why a scientist would decide to do a certain experiment without a theory about what to test and why? Why that experiment and not any of infinite others?
Calling theories useful if they predict future events is called Instrumentalism and it’s a dead end if your goal is to understand reality.
“The magician will pull a rabbit from the hat” might reliably predict what happens, and be testable, but it is not a good scientific explanation because it doesn’t help anyone understand how the trick works.
If you’re curious, the reason the science is bad because it’s explanationless