[danhorner]

I loved this review. This is systems biology at its best: simple hypotheses let us build models that explain/predict emergent behaviour. How cool to explain that a biological oscillator can produce periodically repeating structures during development!

And the title is spot on: without getting hung up on the details we can look for structural insights. There's no shame in the "pathetic thinking". Keeping it simple eliminates the perils of overfitting.