Paul doesn't always form a strong take-home conclusion about works he's analyzing. Sometimes he just thoughtfully analyzes them. You can draw your own conclusions, or if you don't care to, interpret it as "rambling" and read someone else.

Regarding the biological consensus falling apart, that's very amusing! I have no idea what consensus you mean. But biology is on a roll these days (cancer is finally starting to fall to tailored therapies made with awareness of the regulatory processes exploited by specific cancers, for instance), and whoever thinks we have "it all almost figured out" needs to take a careful look at the actual complexity of the systems under study and the ability of our tools to gather information about those systems to realize that we'd have to get very lucky indeed for that to be true.