Comment by pixl97

Emergent properties is one of the places where pure understanding tends to break down under incomprehensibly huge problem space.

For example people have been doing accidental science the start of human agriculture by selective breeding without understanding the mechanics of DNA transfer. And your right Geneticists look for answers and attempt to minimize the size of the problem space in order to attempt to find answer faster, but the staggering number of interactions that can be caused by a single gene expression pretty much require to pick one place to look at with a microscope and ignore everything else going on around it in order to get an answer in a human lifetime.