How has that changed the relationship with molecular biology?
The second half of the 20th Century was marked by the “triumph of the molecule” as it were. This was the era of molecular biology. But it was also the era of extremely reductionist and intensely focused biology that was problem-oriented, and therefore was concentrated typically on a single species at a time. The people who succeeded in that method of science did so brilliantly, but they lost all sense of the diversity of life, and they lost all sense of evolution. Therefore, they lost all appreciation of what was referred to, dismissively often, as traditional biology, what had gone before. In the second half of the 20th Century, that spanned pretty much my career as a biologist. I lived through that era and I was, in one sense, disadvantaged, and in another extremely fortunate. Disadvantaged because I was in a field that was being marginalized by the community of biological scientists, undersupported, and generally underappreciated. I was at a great advantage, however, in that it was
