I think he's being a little facetious - what he probably means is that if you attempt to get any true scientific rigor of that is going on in biological or chemical systems you end up facing the limits of physics in being able to explain what is going on. So rather and try to have scientific rigor, you just accept things the way they are and memorize the outputs and if anyone asks "why is it like that", your answers are either:

* Because God said so

* Find out yourself and get a nobel prize

Either way, even if you don't know what the answers are, you can still do serious work at a higher level of abstraction.

I would think just because everything is so cumulatively complicated and interconnected that if you tried to trace a line through a complex biological processes and explain it all you will end up with 1,000 PhD thesis topics to figure out and thousands more you just hadn't noticed yet. And at the end of the day none of that might be all that useful for describing the larger process at work. So at some point when someone ask "Why does X do Y" you gotta just settle on "because that's the way it is" and move on.

biology is full of exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. like immunology

so there is no way to extrapolate/interpolate, anything which was not directly measured is basically unknown since it could be yet another exception

or in programming language, the worse spaghetti code you could imagine, full of feature flags randomly enabled inconsistently