We're on the cusp of a huge revolution in genetic engineering. I figure it's like what the computer industry was like in 1980.
An awful lot of money is going to be made.
An awful lot of money is going to be made.
But let's skip the part where hosts are infected by engineered viruses.
Honestly aside from crispr not much has changed since 10 years ago (and I know this is sacrilege on hn but crispr is not that exciting outside of making some lab techiques easier and maybe enabling human germline editing, which it sees no one does).
As to your first point- we are nowhere close to a complete evolutionary tree of life (assuming we could come up with what "complete" means). I agree we have good estimations of some basic major splits, but many things are in flux. Early origins? "Kingdom" classifications change multiple times each year still.
Your second point (aside from "people are dumb", which doesn't really hold) is not about evolution, and I'm not experienced enough to make a judgement. I strongly doubt, however, that the full capacity of "compute" you need to actually do genomics, is anywhere near enough to answer everything we'd want to. Today you need a full team of support, not just one person with grounded first principles (which I agree is often missing, but it's also required of more than one expert type).
For many things you probably need to only do a blast search. for example, I identified candidate mutations in an enzyme one combination of which dramatically improved the output by carefully doing a blast search. Likewise, my postdoc boss basically figured out an entire small molecule biosynthetic pathway with ~ a day's worth of blast searching.
To understand transcriptional networks, you can get really far with qpcr, or if you want to get really old school yeast-two-hybrid, both of these impossible without genomics.
We have total organism knockout Libraries in yeast and e coli that are powerful tools, and have a genome that we've minimized to sub-500 genes. Yes there's 100 or so that we don't understand (mostly short transmembrane proteins that honestly probably need to be there in bulk just to maintain tonicity). These are just the projects I've directly worked on or been a fly-on-the-wall on.
Anyways, point is most of the really bid things that the genomics revolutionized have been ticked off. There's still a lot to do, obviously, but I think we know more than you're giving credit for. It does nobody a service to treat biology as a mysterious black box that will never be penetrated.
And other like pig and monkey resulted from same technique.
The covid vaccines are an example.