E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

So the important questions are, first, do general organizing principles exist that allow a living organism to be reconstituted in full without recourse to brute force simulation of all its molecules and atoms? Second, will the same principles apply to mind, behavior, and ecosystems? Third, is there a body of mathematics that will serve as a natural language for biology, parallel to the one that works so well for physics? Fourth, even if the correct principles are discovered, how detailed must factual information be in order to use those principles in the desired models?