It’s much, much harder than that! The watch was at least designed by a human, with parts that have at most a few simultaneous functions. All the parts are big enough to see, and made of metal so constant shape-shifting isn’t part of their functionality. It was mostly designed to be understandable. Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder.
Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.
>Biology is just a giant soup of whatever works. Any organizing principles are accidental or only exist in the eye of the beholder.
Evolution is the difficult-to-understand answer to this; we tend to anthropomorphically and erroneously assign intent and purpose in a chicken/egg and begging-the-question way.
Life continues until it doesn't; to assign any more gravitas to our collection of localized complexity is the same awe that a plebeian holds when presented with a meatball-and-spaghetti-on-a-wall painting of modern art; ignorant to them that it was all that remained after a rather particularly sticky food fight.
Finding some temporary unifying mechanism or principle to organize understanding with is the only way to make progress, but the history of biology is packed with ideas that eventually hardened into dogma and blocked progress until somebody managed to blow them up.