As a (hopefully interesting!) aside, on the scale of most biological molecular dynamics simulations, quantum mechanical contributions can largely be ignored, because the mechanics of the large, heavy nuclei dominate the system. There are a few instances where a hybrid classical/quantum force field is necessary though, like any simulation involving breaking/formation of chemical bonds (where electrons must be treated explicitly).
The computational power needed for the treatment of a very large system (e.g. whole-organism, or even whole-cell) using fundamental physical laws (like QM, and probably even a classical approximation) will be out of reach for at least the next few decades (probably :)). So I would argue that while it's technically true that biology is a phenomenon which emerges from fundamental physical laws, it's sufficient for the time being to treat biology as a field distinct from, but ultimately dependent on, physics.
Yeah, I largely agree. My comment was more to indicate that when Xcelerate thinks about simulating a biological process, he thinks on the level of simulating individual atoms, which is much more likely to make someone think about the fundamental physics of the problem. When I simulate biological processes, I think in terms of chemistry or stat mech. Rather than one molecule I'm dealing with collections of many types of molecules whose interactions are often ill defined anyway, so I'm much more likely to think "eh, the chemistry we have is good enough, let's just get on with it"
The computational power needed for the treatment of a very large system (e.g. whole-organism, or even whole-cell) using fundamental physical laws (like QM, and probably even a classical approximation) will be out of reach for at least the next few decades (probably :)). So I would argue that while it's technically true that biology is a phenomenon which emerges from fundamental physical laws, it's sufficient for the time being to treat biology as a field distinct from, but ultimately dependent on, physics.