Physicists’ theories, biology’s brains work best when they’re models of efficiency
When scientists talk about computer models, they don’t mean little toy facsimiles of a PC or Mac. A computer model is a digital representation of some piece of reality. It’s a translation of matter and motion into math, so a computer can calculate how a process will unfold under various circumstances.
Of course, even before computers, scientists still devised models. It was just harder to do the math. Scientists did their own calculations, using models to guide their expectations of what a natural system would do or how an experiment would turn out.