Strategy and tactics

Abstract

There are two possible ways of attempting to understand, experimentally, a complex phenomenon such as cell differentiation. The first, which we may call the reductionist approach, is to break the overall problem down into several smaller problems — much as we have done in the previous section — and then find an animal (or plant, sufficiently simple that it shows only those features necessary for an understanding of each smaller problem. For example, this argument suggests that the bacteriophage (or phage), as the simplest living system (from the chemical point of view) to show the inheritance of mutant characteristics, would be useful for studies of the nature and behaviour of the genetic material and in this case, of course, this reductionist argument has proved tremendously successful.