Having done a lot of biology, I'd disagree that we understand biology.
My background is neuro, so take that into account. But in neuro, we've nearly no idea about the larger parts of how it all works. Sure, yeah, electrically active neurons, we have that down. But the non electrically active parts? I mean, we're still debating about how much of the brain is glia. Like, we can't even agree on how to count. Don't get me started on synapses.
I don't even think we understand software, much less biology :-) We can only hope to understand the pieces that are most relevant to the business domain we're trying to solve (like curing a disease or expanding an online business). The complexity of both types of systems is just increasing exponentially over time, so there's little hope (or even need) to understand the whole thing. The challenge is, of course, to understand what's relevant in the first place.
And just like in software, we can only hope to come with the right levels of abstraction and disregard the irrelevant parts at each level of understanding.
For sure - and I don't think we necessarily have the ANYONE part either :-) The reason for that is folks who build systems often leave, and the details of why or even how they did something leave with them. At some point, there's no one in the company who understands certain things.
And the analogy with biology actually goes even further - just like in software, we "know" the code (DNA), but how does that translate to the behavior of the complex system (and business requirements in software), is lost to time and the sheer complexity of these systems.
So someone builds something and they leave, and you can’t figure out their code? Or more importantly, you’re suggesting it’s impossible to figure out that code by anyone? Seems a stretch don’t you think?
he's not saying it's impossible to figure out some piece of code, but "all" code. There is just too much of it! Going into even something as relatively simple as an operating system, let alone a whole ecosystem with drivers, internet protocols & more would take many lifetimes.
The "anyone" part comes because there are countless parts of those infinately complex systems that have no documentation and no maintainers. They can individually be reverse engineered if it is needed in an individual case, but nobody is going to do that for most of them.
Even in your own example, there’s no ambiguity in the fact that glia play a role is not under question. What percentage, IMO, is just a detail. My analogy still stands I think but I suppose that’s open to interpretation.
One question I implore you to ask yourself is how much of this “we don’t fully understand it” attitude comes from indoctrination of that way of thinking that you need to have to write grants and aggrandize your own research topic. As Sydney Brenner said a long time back, (in the context of mol bio) the fundamentals have been discovered, we can let the Americans figure out the details.
If we really understood biology, or even just precisely what aspects of a given phenomenon we need to investigate and how in order to understand it, we wouldn't have wasted a decade trying to reduce CVD by increasing HDL. Billions of dollars wouldn't have been wasted chasing the wrong mechanistic hypotheses in Alzheimer's treatment. Cancer would have already been sorted.
Since 15 years ago, extracellular vesicles went from particles used to export rubbish from cells, perhaps with some vague immune involvement, to one of the fundamental mechanisms involved in intercellular communication, carrying nucleic acids between cells.
The reality is the more we understand in biology, the larger we realise biology is and the relative amount of information that still needs to be figured out doesn't change much - especially when you look at it in terms of labour required, because what left is progressively less-low hanging fruit.
My background is neuro, so take that into account. But in neuro, we've nearly no idea about the larger parts of how it all works. Sure, yeah, electrically active neurons, we have that down. But the non electrically active parts? I mean, we're still debating about how much of the brain is glia. Like, we can't even agree on how to count. Don't get me started on synapses.