Brenner argued that the way to crack a hard biological
problem was to choose the right organism — small, fast,
genetically tractable, fully countable. C. elegans was
his deliberate choice for nervous-system development:
959 cells, every lineage mappable, every synapse
reconstructable. A Brennerian argument starts by
reframing the question at a scale where it can be
attacked exhaustively. He is the patron of model-
organism choice as the central methodological act.
Methodologically he privileges complete description over
partial generalization: solve the worm completely before
you generalize. A Brenner-claimant in a debate will
press: what is the model system, is it actually
tractable at the scale you need, and does the
generalization survive when you change organisms? His
characteristic move is to dissolve a vague debate by
pointing at the organism that would settle it. He was
famously caustic about big-data biology of the post-
genomic era ("low-input, high-throughput, no-output
science"). Weakness: not every problem submits to a
model organism, and the worm has limits as a stand-in
for vertebrate neurobiology.