I once asked my chemist friend how much did we have to know about particle physics to do organic chemistry.

Hr replied all you needed was protons, neutrons and electrons. Regardless of the fine structure and behavior of those particles, all chemical reactions and molecular structures could be explained using just three. You don't need quarks or mesons to do chemistry (although they no doubt play a vital role in the structure of matter. Subatomic particles were essential to predict what goes on in nuclear chemistry (radio chemistry), but you can do anything you want with protein synthesis, nucleic acid, cell metabolism, RNA, you name it, without anything else but protons, neutrons and electrons. You don't even need antiparticles. In other words, you can describe and explain the phenomenally complex processes and structures of the cell without needing to go any deeper than p+, n, and e-. In fact, all you really need is the periodic table. You don't need to know the component parts of atoms to understand chemical compounds. You don't even need to know what an isotope is.

The only exception is that the shapes and sizes of electron shells determine the architecture and configurations of molecules, and whether certain reactions can occur, or how fast they will proceed; but you don't need to know the shape and bond angles of H2O to understand how things dissolve in it and precipitate out of it. That can be measured directly, you know the how, you don't need the why.

Likewise, you can do genetics and evolutionary biology without knowing any chemistry at all. When Darwin and Mendel worked, we hadn't even established the existence of atoms! And you can study ecology, or predator-prey relationships, or reproductive biology, animal behavior or population dynamics with no knowledge of evolution or natural selection. Simpler structures and processes assemble into more complex ones, which can be studied and understood with no knowledge of the levels of complexity that lie beneath. Humans are animals, and we study psychology with only a very poor knowledge of the biology (or chemistry, or particle physics) that operates our brains. And humans can assemble into social groups studied by sociologists, which can further assemble into larger cultures studied by anthropologists, and even larger and more durable ones studied by historians. At different scales the universe looks different, and different laws seem to emerge from what lies below.

A few simple rules (they can be written down in only a few hundred words) completely determine how chess is played, but there's a lot more to the game than just knowing how the pieces move.