A largely ceremonial explanation

I'm finally reading a clipping from the January 2000 issue of Harper's, an extract from David Berlinski's The Advent of the Algorithm. I had clipped it because his earlier book on the calculus had helped me better understand that subject (no small feat, considering that, astonishingly, no math was required of liberal arts majors at my undergraduate university in the 1960s). One paragraph from the Harper's excerpt has especially caught my attention:

The complexity of human artifacts, the things that human beings make, finds its explanation in human intelligence. The intelligence responsible for the construction of complex artifacts--watches, computers, military campaigns, federal budgets, this very essay--finds its explanation in biology. Yet however invigorating it is to see the algorithmic pattern appear and reappear, especially on the molecular biological level, it is important to remember, if only because it is so often forgotten, that in very large measure we have no idea how the pattern is amplified. Yet the explanation of complexity that biology affords is largely ceremonial. At the very heart of molecular biology, a great mystery is vividly in evidence, as these symbolic forms bring an organism into existence, control its morphology and development, and slip a copy of themselves into the future (19-20).