I had a bio professor put it this way: pretend you are reverse engineering alien technology. Throw away all your anthropocentric ways of thinking.

Biology was not designed by human minds and doesn’t work like something we would design. Everything influences everything else and its feedback control loops all the way down. It’s more like a vibrating causal cloud than a chain of causality.

That was in the early 2000s and while I’ve been out of the field mostly since then I still don’t get the sense that we have a solid conceptual vocabulary for things like this.