While reading "In theory" by Sydney Brenner, the nobel laureate at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982297700952?np=y, I felt swooned that I am not wrong in practicing theoretical biology most of the time.
According to Animesh Ray of Keck Graduate Institute, publishing hypotheses used to be the norm in the past. The first Watson and Crick paper was little more than a hypothesis (The first sentence of that paper was: "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.)."). So was the Corey-Pauling alpha-helix paper. "one-gene, one-enzyme" paper by Beadle and Tatum was a hypothesis. The first DNA coding paper by Gamow was a hypothesis. Although not formally published, Crick's famed tRNA paper, which introduced the "wobble-hypothesis" for the third anticodon position, which allowed deciphering of the genetic code, was a hypothesis, was widely circulated among the practitioners. The central dogma paper by Crick was a hypothesis. The so-called French-flag model of morphogen gradient in developmental biology was a hypothesis by Lewis Wolpert. Crick wrote a paper in Nature in early 1970s on the probable physical size limit of morphogens, which was entirely a hypothesis (no morphogen was yet identified). The proposal that eukaryotic chromosome ends must have a special structure (specifically, a hair-pin, which some 15 years later was discovered as telomeres) was a hypothesis advanced by Jim Watson in the late 1960s in Nature. The famous Bohr's paper on atomic theory was strictly speaking a hypothesis (consistent with past data), the general theory of relativity was a hypothesis (proved a few years later by observing the bending of light past the sun during a complete solar eclipse).
Schroedinger's equation paper was a hypothesis (it can't be derived). Plank's famous paper that introduced quantization of energy was a hypothesis. I could go on and on. In recent times, journal editors and reviewers have generally and unintentionally conspired together to not publish hypothesis without validation, because of impact factor considerations--a hypothesis without validation is hard to evaluate, and so it is risky for a journal to publish because it might be proved wrong and then the article would not be cited further. For example, in the early-to-mid seventies, there was a paper published in Nature entitled "A quantum mechanical muscle model" (or something very close to that language), which proposed that actin and myosin molecules generate force through a quantum mechanical resonance process, which turned out to be untestable (not incorrect, mind you), and was hardly cited (the untimely death by suicide of the author due to depression might have contributed to the paper not much cited, however). Unfortunately, as Carl Popper has shown, hypotheses that are proven wrong are the most useful hypotheses for the progress of science. So the current trend arguably might impede progress. Remember -- the idea that the earth was round was once also thought-of as radical.
On the other end, journals consider results incomplete if we do not use the statistical operation (which are hypothetical as well) for instance check out all the recent uproar about P value nonsense in journals like Nature and Science.. Secondly, every paper ends with hypothesis that is taken as a lead for further research.
