Seems obvious, but you'd be surprised at how many people think having a
computer program which processes massive amounts of information adds
credibility.
I wouldn't claim that they do add "credibility", whatever that really
is. I think we should try to understand functional mechanisms at as deep a
level as possible, with first-principles explanations as a goal. Peel back
the layers of the onion, so to speak. With a cautious approach that uses
sensitivity analysis to check how important unknown data are for the
results in question, once can head in this direction even with extinct
animals. Qualitative or intuitive approaches are seldom able to either
delve toward first-principles or analyze the importance of their unknowns.
They tend to stay on the outside of the onion. Computers happen to be
tools that are useful for doing both things, or one can do the calculations
by hand. As I've been emphasizing, apparently to no avail, the presence or
absence of a computer simulation is irrelevant; they are just
time-savers. The tyrannosaur paper we wrote could have been calculated
solely with paper and pencil, and in fact during my thesis work I did that
anyway just so I'd know how it was done; it wasn't that complex.
The holy grail sought by both biomechanical and
qualitative/analogy-based/intuitive/beer-drinking armchair approaches is an
understanding of how mechanisms work in animals, particularly how form and
function are related, and how to apply that understanding comparatively or
to a single animal. I prefer biomechanical approaches to the latter
approaches for understanding functional mechanisms for the reasons already
mentioned, among others. To me, biomechanics is simply a deeper, more
satisfying and fertile approach. I have learned how approaches that infer
function directly from form alone, without much understanding or even
consideration of underlying mechanisms, are often wrong because they
overlook complex interactions or emergent properties. Outside of the onion
problem. Because organisms are very complex (many layers), all approaches
suffer from this problem to some degree or another, of course, but not
necessarily all to the same degree.
George Lauder wrote a wonderful (and healthily cynical) paper on this
problem in the 1995 (JJ Thomason, ed) Functional Morphology in Vertebrate
Paleontology volume; I recommend it to all. (Also see a great paper by
Mimi Koehl called "When does morphology matter?" in Ann.Rev.Ecol.Syst 1996,
iirc) I know some people that read Lauder's paper, then swore never to try
doing functional analysis in paleontology, as they were left feeling
hopeless. I have more hope than that, and biomechanics (with sensitivity
analysis) is a big reason why I do. I use many different methods in
addition to biomechanics in order to seek for the solution that available
lines of evidence point toward, with the expectation that eventually the
best answer will be found via consilience of independent inquiries. More
of those inquiries shall come in some of my upcoming papers.