The Complexity of Living Things

Although the basic mechanisms that underlie cellular biology are surprisingly few, there are many instances and many variations on these mechanisms, leading to an ocean of detail concerning (for instance) how the process of microtubule attachment to a centrosome differs across different species. Cellular-level systems, because they are so small, are also difficult to observe directly, which means that obtaining this detail experimentally is a long and arduous process, often involving tying together many pieces of indirect evidence. Most importantly, cellular biology is hard to understand because living things are extremely complex—in several different respects.