Even in your own example, there’s no ambiguity in the fact that glia play a role is not under question. What percentage, IMO, is just a detail. My analogy still stands I think but I suppose that’s open to interpretation.
One question I implore you to ask yourself is how much of this “we don’t fully understand it” attitude comes from indoctrination of that way of thinking that you need to have to write grants and aggrandize your own research topic. As Sydney Brenner said a long time back, (in the context of mol bio) the fundamentals have been discovered, we can let the Americans figure out the details.
If we really understood biology, or even just precisely what aspects of a given phenomenon we need to investigate and how in order to understand it, we wouldn't have wasted a decade trying to reduce CVD by increasing HDL. Billions of dollars wouldn't have been wasted chasing the wrong mechanistic hypotheses in Alzheimer's treatment. Cancer would have already been sorted.
Since 15 years ago, extracellular vesicles went from particles used to export rubbish from cells, perhaps with some vague immune involvement, to one of the fundamental mechanisms involved in intercellular communication, carrying nucleic acids between cells.
The reality is the more we understand in biology, the larger we realise biology is and the relative amount of information that still needs to be figured out doesn't change much - especially when you look at it in terms of labour required, because what left is progressively less-low hanging fruit.
One question I implore you to ask yourself is how much of this “we don’t fully understand it” attitude comes from indoctrination of that way of thinking that you need to have to write grants and aggrandize your own research topic. As Sydney Brenner said a long time back, (in the context of mol bio) the fundamentals have been discovered, we can let the Americans figure out the details.