 Notwithstanding the advances of molecular genetics, its methods involve another significant form of control. The uniform conditions typical in molecular genetics exclude dynamics of development in ecological context, a context, moreover, that the organism, with its traits, helps shape (Gilbert &amp; Epel 2009; Lewontin 1983). It could be imagined that genetic investigations of the hereditary basis of traits—or, at least, of differences among traits—for inbred organisms in tightly controlled situations might permit successful extrapolation to the development of traits in an ecological context (as pursued, for example, in investigations of strategies of growth and reproduction over the life course and plasticity of traits under environmental variation [“phenotypic plasticity”;  developmental biology]).  Yet, again, the need for reintegration of these aspects of naturally variable situations may readily get discounted. Consider animal experiments viewed as models for human medicine. Questions are routinely raised about the validity of, say, mice as a model for humans. However, even to speak of “mice” and “humans” is an abstraction that discounts the variation among mice and the variation among humans. If, instead, the variation were paid attention to, the first step would be to note that highly selected strains of laboratory mice are less variable than undomesticated populations (Rader 2004) and experiments made on such mice involve tightly controlled situations. To what extent, it could then be asked, do experimental observations hold for individuals from undomesticated populations raised in varied and far more complex situations? If mechanisms have been exposed using laboratory mice (Tabery 2014), to what extent do they depend on the controlled value of factors that are not typically enumerated when describing the mechanism? Of course, this line of questioning is preempted when biotechnology expands its capacity to control conditions and harness genetically engineered organisms to produce desired products. (Biotechnology can be seen as the industrial manifestation of analytic biology, the program that seeks to understand organisms by cutting them up into some appropriate small parts. Relevant here are the politics, economics, and cultural dimensions of the rise of biotechnology and, before that, genetics itself in the areas of agriculture, health, food science, the legal system, and more. All that lies beyond this entry’s scope; see Müller-Wille &amp; Brandt 2016.)