Do we need the scientific method?

Heard and interview with Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine talking about an article (and book to follow I believe) which proposes that we are now living in an age in which the Scientific Method is obsolete, and that a better approach is accumulation of vast quantities of data to find correlation, with no necessity (or even possibility) of finding the mechanism that lies behind the results:

"Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete....There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot."

So Anderson says we will have to give up on trying to understand "why" because each model we come up with has to be discarded as an inadequate explanation, and the better our data collection, the more we realize ourselves incapable of coming up with an adequate model.  In short, "The End of Theory".

This may be me being a stubborn theorist, but I think where Anderson may be wrong is in thinking that either causation or correlation are going to get at the real.