There was a flurry of papers in the early 2000s that aimed to generalize biological robustness, borrowing from ideas and math from engineering. You might find these interesting:
https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lsdc1/SysBiol/kitano.robustnes...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/msb4100179
https://www.cs.unibo.it/~babaoglu/courses/cas02-03/papers/Ro...
> An Ideal Gas Law chapter problem, with numbers for solid Argon -
Ha!
> First-tier institution students, coming to intro genetics from intro bio, lacking even a firm grasp of central dogma?
Yeah, unfortunately this is a real problem: Foundational biology courses (intro, genetics, cell bio) overwhelm students with a firehose of facts that must be learned or you flunk out. Later, in upper-level undergrad and grad school, those facts start connecting, and biology becomes lots more interesting and actually easier to study.
> Are labels and vocabulary treated as foundational, or as relatively unimportant?
Vocabulary is a big deal in biology. Many terms carry associated meaning, for example polymerase chain reaction helps describe the mechanism, and TAQ polymerase reminds you that heat is important. Bone morphogenic protein says a lot.
That said, plenty of biology terms are pretty useless. Ribosome doesn't provide much intuition other than RNA is involved, and Golgi apparatus is even worse. Many gene names are arbitrary, reflecting a lack of knowledge at the time of discovery. Some are just dorky like sonic hedgehog.
Good undergrad biology books have big, carefully written glossaries in the back, these are absolutely invaluable.
> How important is seeing why things are the way they are?
It's important to internalize: 1) Biology is just physics and chemistry. 2) Millions of years of evolution and randomness produced all these arbitrary biological systems with their endless complexity. That's why living organisms are nothing like rational engineered systems, despite all the shared physics.
> If you haven't seen part of the map, how important is being able to sketch it in plausibly? If fragmented into puzzle pieces, how important is being able to fit them together?
For me, studying any big subject with lots of details, context really helps. It's easy for me to get lost in the details and lose motivation unless the ideas plug into some bigger picture. That's true even if I only want tourist-level knowledge.