Summernight wonders

Another sleepless summer night (too hot, too noisy, viva Centre Ville!). I felt that progress in science is like trying to express the notion of 'cousin', by only using the words 'mother' and 'daughter'. You'll never get there.
Just think it over: First, there is ignorance. Then someone links some sort of macroscopic event to a specific phenotype (say reduced food intake to aging, or impact of famine to offspring characteristics). Then there is the breakthrough discovery that links that phenotype to a molecular event (aging to the klotho gene, or external conditions to histone code). Everyone is happy, until the first 'yes, but's' are being published. And then a multitude of additional and contradictory discoveries flood the field, until nothing is clear anymore, and the whole area goes fractal. Consequently, this field of science will lose interest, and people start looking at other more exciting projects. That's where cell signalling has been for a long time, that's where epigenetics starts getting to, and that's where aging will be soon.