Title shows author doesn't understand programming language design. No, a small set of higher-order functions[1] is not as fundamental as the concept of higher-order functions in the first place.
Author here, thanks for the comment -- since that seemed to have been lost, I'm using "fundamental" because transducers let you describe your logic so that it that can be applied over sequences and non-sequences in a way that you cannot by just applying composed logic functions through existing clojure machinery.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2cv6l4/clojures_tra...