Because she was familiar with the corn plants in her experiments, McClintock was able to recognize unexpected results from corn breeding experiments and deduce the existence of transposable genetic elements. The significance of McClintock's discovery was not recognized until researchers in the 1970's found a similar phenomenon in bacteria. She later received due recognition with the Nobel Prize in 1983. There is a relationship between an organism's structure and how it works. Form fits function.
Biological structure gives clues about what it does and how it works.
Knowing a structure's function gives insights about its construction. This correlation is apparent at many levels of biological organization. Organisms are open systems that interact continuously with their environments Organisms interact with their environment, which includes other organisms as well as abiotic factors. Both organism and environment are affected by the interaction between them.