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...advances in theoretical physics may force biologists to consider non-physical causes but I suspect they would prefer any model that does not cross the hard boundary they insist exists between science and theology.

Indeed. That there is such a boundary largely explains the antipathy of science for final causes.

To many, the idea of final cause smacks of teleology and thus by implication theology. And there is a sense in which this is true — on the cosmological scale; i.e., if there is a Prime Mover or Uncaused Cause of the universe and its order, then it will have a final cause, or purpose or goal — the "reason" for which it acted in the first place. Of course, this is not necessarily a religious insight; it simply follows from Aristotle's theory of causation.

To consider final cause on the cosmological scale seems irrelevant to the study of biology. Moreoever, the scientific method does not seem at all suited to engage cosmological questions in the first place.

But Aristotle himself recognized that all four causes — formal, material, efficient, and final — are operative within nature.

As Robert Rosen wrote (in Life Itself) WRT final cause, "...for centuries past, it has been part of the essential core of science itself that science and finality are incompatible." He suggests that science shuns final cause because it evokes the idea of telos— final cause on the cosmological scale (teleology).

But as Rosen says, "finality and teleology are in fact very different things.... I am suggesting, on formal grounds, the possibility of separating finality from teleology, of retaining the former while, if we wish, discarding the latter."

The three "traditional" [scientific] causal categories (formal, material, and efficient causation) always respect [the serial] flow of "formal time", in the sense that "cause" Q always precedes effect P. Final causation gives the appearance, at any rate, of violating this flow, in the sense that the effect P seems to be acting back on the causal process that is generating it; it appears that the "future" is actively affecting the "past." I say "appears" because this (traditional) interpretation of finality confuses P with its final cause; it is not the effect P, but the final cause of P, that must operate on the process by which P is generated. The temporal anomaly remains, however; final cause clearly cannot fit within the same temporal sequence in which the other causal categories harmoniously operate. [Itals in the original]

I believe the "temporal anomaly" that Rosen recognizes here is the main source of the difficultly we have understanding, say, what Alex Williams' inversely-causal metainformation is. To me, I-C M appears to operate as a final cause in the Rosenian sense just given.

Our ordinary conceptions of time are again found wanting to explain even what we encounter in nature. Or so it seems to me, FWIW.

Thank you so very much, dearest sister in Christ, for your outstanding observations!