I don't have a PhD in biology (or in anything), but isn't temperature a single number "explaining" a gazillion interactions we will never "understand"?
It doesn't explain so much as summarize and it does so about as well as a mean or a median (which makes sense because temperature is literally the average of all the kinetic energies of all the microscopic components). It doesn't tell you about the distribution of energies, although in some extremely simple model systems you can compute the distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_dist...