The reductionist biology that dominated the second half of the 20th Century is in decline. Genomics has revealed widespread functional genetic variation. This is too much variation genome-wide than can be encompassed in reductionist analysis couched in terms of simple pathways. While reductionist biology made significant contributions, and will continue to solve some single-gene puzzles, its day as a paradigm-setting approach is now done. Bioinformatics and systems biology approaches have already begun to change biology.
The laboratories of Rose and others at UC Irvine’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are building a new biology based on genomics, experimental evolution, and statistical learning. These are powerful tools for rebuilding biology, especially when used together. They are the tools that Lyceum is based on.
Rose and his colleagues don’t bask in support from the reductionist biological establishment. But their experimental methods readily yield powerful results that are published in prominent venues. They can do this because they have many outbred populations. And they do experiments on a very large scale, which allows them to overcome the statistical problems of dealing with genomes that vary at more than a million locations.