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A-G: This indeed has been the presupposition of modern science since Newton, namely that since physics and chemistry can be understood as a mechanism therefore biology can be fully understood the same way.

wagglebee: You nailed it right here!

Kant had something interesting to say about mechanistic presuppositions (in Critique of Judment):

For it is quite certain that in terms of merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible. So certain is this that we may boldly assert that it is absurd ... to hope that perhaps some day another Newton might arise who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws ... how even a mere blade of grass is produced (the "Newton of the leaf").

Kant and Newton were contemporaries (~1650). Since their time, seemingly no "Newton of the leaf" has yet appeared....

Thus Robert Rosen argues (after Schröedinger) that the "old physics" can't cut it with biological systems. A "new physics" is sorely needed.

To this day, today, the formidable powers of theoretical physics find nothing to say about the biosphere, nor does any physicist contemplating the mysteries of life speak of them qua physicist. This, I would argue, is because biology remains today, as it has always been, a repository of conceptual enigmas for physicists, and not technical problems to be dealt with through mere ingenuity or the application of familiar algorithms. Somehow, the life gets irretrievably lost whenever this is attempted. Is this merely because we are doing it badly or remain lacking in our data? This is hardly likely.

In short: Any mechanical model is the WRONG MODEL to begin with. Such models are simply too "impoverished" to deal with biology....

This is not to say that biological organisms are not material systems, or that they do not project into the objective world just as any other material system does. The point is, biological systems cannot be reduced to material systems only. They come with something "extra." Now contemporary physicists have been known to start yelling "Vitalism!" whenever anyone simply notices that, in fact, they obviously do. As Kant did, above. Thus, writes Rosen, "Their response has always been to try to suck the subjective life out of them; to reduce them to immaculately objective things designed to be orthogonal to them."

That is a rather stunning statement when you think about it. Rosen elaborates:

My suggestion here is that this objective world, which constitutes the goal of physics, the ideal for which it strives, is in fact a highly non-generic one, far too restrictive and specialized to accommodate things like organisms. Biology is not simply a special case in that world, a rare and overly complicated anomaly, a nongeneric excrescence in a generic world of objective things. To the contrary, it is that world itself that is nongeneric, and it is organisms which are too general to fit into it. This too counts as an objective fact, and it is one with which (contemporary) physics must come to terms, if it indeed seeks to comprehend all of material nature within its precincts. It cannot do this and at the same time maintain its claim to only allow objective things into it. Biology already will not pass through that extraneous filter, a filter which, ironically, it itself quite subjective in character.