  While Schaffner still maintains that molecular genetics can in principle reduce classical genetics, he has conceded that attempts to carry out the reduction would be “peripheral” to the advance of molecular genetics. One might respond, along the lines of Hull (1977), that the success of molecular genetics seems to be reductive in some important sense. Hence, the failure to illuminate this success in terms of reduction reveals a conceptual defiency. That is, one might argue that Schaffner's peripherality thesis indicates that his conception of reduction is not the epistemically relevant one because it cannot illuminate the fruitfulness of reductive inquiry in molecular genetics.