cellular differentiation

Most education consists of moving from the general to the particular. When young, everyone learns to read, write and do math to some degree. College usually repeats this process but with more depth in a single subject. But the more time in school, the more specialized the learning becomes. People who go on to graduate school specialize in 1 subject for 2 to 6 years. The learning become extremely specialized. You become like a red blood cell which has lost its DNA and can pretty much do only one thing; transport oxygen through out the body.

"Waddington, in his proposed epigenetic landscape, envisioned that cellular differentiation is like a ball rolls down a landscape of hills with valleys where the endpoint of each valley represent a discrete cell type. The potential of the ball (cell) to choose different valleys (cell fates) gradually decreased at each bifurcation point."