This is a wood-cut of The Blind Men and The Elephant. It's a reminder that any complex subject can be studied in many ways. It is certainly true for any complex subject. Anthropology can study universal patterns of the belief and behavior across the world's societies as well as the ways in which they differ, Psychology can study universal patterns in human behavior as well as a few differences among different individuals, Biology, Chemistry, Physics and the Physical Sciences reveal how nature works in different levels with each level more complex than the levels before it, and even Fiction can illuminate us by showing the universal themes and plots that obsess people in their pensive stories.
In application, it is possible for us to reverse engineer any complex object of study. To take an analogy, most of us don't understand in detail how a rocket works. But however incompletely we understand how a rocket works, we all understand by what general process it came into existence. It was designed by humans on drawing boards. We can look at the model and study its parts. A complex thing such as a rocket is actually made up of simple parts combined together to make up a complex whole whose over-all function is completely different from the parts that constitute it. Our world is dominated by feats of engineering and works of art. There's actually more to a seemingly simple thing once we see it in layers and the seemingly complex object is actually made up of parts that are simple.
The universe that we know, of course, is a tiny fragment of the actual universe. There may be yet more complicated objects than us on other planets, and some of them may already know about us.The computer on which I am writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes (one byte is used to hold each character of text). The computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured. The brain with which you are understanding my words is an array of some ten million kiloneurones. Many of these billions of nerve cells have each more than a thousand 'electric wires' connecting them to other neurones. Moreover, at the molecular genetic level, every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire computer. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design. But the complicated things everywhere have a special kind of explanation. We can determine why they came into existence and why they are complicated. We can do it like the men exploring the elephant.
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