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I often wonder if we'll ever be ready to understand how a system works in its entirety. I just don't think our brains work that way, absorbing whole things and intuitively understanding the workings behind them. We can look at something and get the gist of what it is and what it does without looking too closely, but to truly understand its inner workings we always start by taking said thing apart piece by piece. There's just too much information. I agree that a reductionist view doesn't really help when studying systems themselves... I just can't think of how to approach it more holistically in a way that's actually practical.

I agree with that last sentence in the paragraph, though. We always seem to find the most significant things by accident. It almost seems as if we'll never find the answer consciously... We look in the wrong places all too often.