Biology, being one of the younger sciences, is still relatively descriptive. Most biological studies are still focused on identification, description, and classification of component parts.

To the right is a diagram. How does the machine work? What does it do? It's not easy to tell from the diagram. Despite the fact that biological structures tend to be vastly more complicated than simple machines like this (the gear drive for a snowblower), diagrams like this are the goal of many modern reductionist biological studies. Tens of billions of dollars are spent in the U.S. alone on these sorts of endeavors. They have titles like: "Cloning and characterization of..." or "Ultrastructural analysis of...".

Other studies are 'perturbational'. Here, the goal is to remove or disrupt a part and see what happens. In biology, this is done genetically (using mutations) or pharmacologically (using drugs). Would the gear drive depicted here work if you left out part number 14? If it did not (e.g. the snow blower didn't blow snow) what would you conclude? Biological studies like this have titles like "Functional analysis of..." and generally end up concluding that when you leave parts out, the machine doesn't work. The best studies derive information about part function from careful analysis of the failure.

Once you've got a list of parts, know the relationship between different parts, and know what happens to the machine's function when you mess up or leave out certain parts, then presumably you can advance to the next stage of biological understanding. And this stage will allow us to understand how biological systems really work and how to re-engineer them for better performance. Right?

I hope so, because this is what biologists are trying to do.