Biology is not a lawful science. That is to say, you can’t start with a set of principles and reason your way to interesting conclusions.
The big intellectual leaps in biology always follow advances in technique and technology, particularly those advances that make data collection faster and easier.
The biggest advance of all – Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection – followed on an explosion of knowledge in natural history created by advances in transportation technology. Darwin spent years minutely comparing barnacles and other creatures collected from all over the world. No one even thought to ask about the origin of species until it became apparent just how many species there were, and saw how their differences were driven as much by geographical separation as by function.
Germ theory and cell theory were enabled by better microscopes.
Disproving vitalism – the notion that the chemistry of life was separate from other chemistry – required the technologies developed by German coal-tar chemists.
Genetics required the development of model systems such as fruit flies and Neurospora that generated enormous amounts of data in short periods of time.
Molecular biology required the discovery of bacteriophages, which also enabled big datasets to be created with minimal effort.
Genomics and microbiomics required the scalable sequencing technologies created in Fred Sanger’s lab.
The list here is endless, and of course there are exceptions. But biology has always been much more data-driven than theory-driven. You don’t get to play with ideas until after you have cranked out the data. If you don’t like doing that – if you don’t find it rewarding – then someone else is going to make the big conceptual leaps.
If you ain’t a lab rat, you ain’t squat.