I've seen this claim repeated a bunch of times, it spreads as a meme, but the analogy doesn't work that well. This is not a special feature of biology! Chemical engineering involves lots of trial and error, physics is all about neglecting complicated aspects of a situation and hoping the result is still useful, even fundamental physics has a bunch of cancelations that work with no very good justification (see troubles around renormalization) and then fail when you try to do quantum gravity. Even math has things we know are true but have no good conception of why -- see John Conway on the Monster Group ("there's never been any kind of explanation for why it's there"): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4
The whole world has always been like this. It's just showing up with force here.
I've seen this claim repeated a bunch of times, it spreads as a meme, but the analogy doesn't work that well. This is not a special feature of biology! Chemical engineering involves lots of trial and error, physics is all about neglecting complicated aspects of a situation and hoping the result is still useful, even fundamental physics has a bunch of cancelations that work with no very good justification (see troubles around renormalization) and then fail when you try to do quantum gravity. Even math has things we know are true but have no good conception of why -- see John Conway on the Monster Group ("there's never been any kind of explanation for why it's there"): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4
The whole world has always been like this. It's just showing up with force here.