Are you rejecting Weinberg's famous comment? "The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems."
I profoundly believe that Weinberg is wrong. I also happen to think that Weinberg is utterly brilliant. He's one of the best defenders of the pure reductionist stance. But once you've got agency, you've got meaning. This is the beginning of a change in our scientific worldview. Agency is real, so meaning is real in the universe. Value is real, at least in the biosphere. And these things can't be talked about by physicists.
So the reductionist model breaks down when we're talking about how life evolves.
Absolutely. This idea is frightening at first, but then utterly liberating. For 3.8 billion years, the biosphere has been expanding from the origin of life into what I call "the adjacent possible." Once we're at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It's doing something that it's never done before.
To take one example, I argue that the evolutionary emergence of the human heart cannot be deduced from physics. That doesn't mean it breaks any laws of physics. But there's no way of getting from physics to the emergence of hearts in the evolution of the biosphere. If you were to ask Darwin, what's the function of the heart? he would have said it's to pump blood. That's what Darwin meant by adaptation. But there may be other causal consequences of the heart, or any other part of you, that are of no functional significance in the current environment, but may become useful in a different environment.