I think I only sort of agree with this. There does seem to be some level (macroscopic organs) at which biology makes tons of sense and is relatively immediately understandable. But I get the impression that once you start trying to understand the thing more specifically, and critically, actually do anything in the domains of biology, like medicine or nutrition, you pretty quickly hit a massive wall of non-understandability. My impression is that most medicine is virtually just randomly trying stuff and rolling with what seems to have non-zero benefit and statistically negligible harm. (This post is an elaborated opinion on this.)
Another example is in understanding how the mind/​brain works. We now have an absolutely wild amount of data about how the brain is structured, but on an actual day-to-day operating level, we are barely able to do better than the ancient Greeks.
I think I only sort of agree with this. There does seem to be some level (macroscopic organs) at which biology makes tons of sense and is relatively immediately understandable. But I get the impression that once you start trying to understand the thing more specifically, and critically, actually do anything in the domains of biology, like medicine or nutrition, you pretty quickly hit a massive wall of non-understandability. My impression is that most medicine is virtually just randomly trying stuff and rolling with what seems to have non-zero benefit and statistically negligible harm. (This post is an elaborated opinion on this.)
Another example is in understanding how the mind/​brain works. We now have an absolutely wild amount of data about how the brain is structured, but on an actual day-to-day operating level, we are barely able to do better than the ancient Greeks.