I'm thinking a lot about the arguments in complex systems science for treating higher-level laws, such as evolution by natural selection, as fundamental rather than merely effective laws emerging from the laws of particles and fields, as most physicists view them. I’m talking about views that posit evolution as higher-level principles, which say something like: all objects are made of atoms and fields, but despite that, certain laws of nature do not even in principle follow from the laws for atoms and fields, but are fundamental. But we physicists have developed the habit of thinking that all higher-level laws follow from the laws of atoms or elementary particles. 

But then again, I think it may be so that there are higher-level fundamental principles that are supervenient on familiar particles and fields, but the debate as to "derivable in principle or not derivable in principle from microphysics" dissolve as a ill defined debate–because that debate seem to be based on a picture of the world as though it is conway's game of life (in which case we can ask if the laws of complex structures can be in principle be derived from laws of cells). 

But the world need not be like Conway's game of life. In which case, the debate makes no sense. 

To be clear, there are cases where we can infer macroscopic behavior from microscopic description of elementary particles: for instance, our inference of electricity from Bloch’s theory for electrons, for example; this example still isn't exactly like Conway’s game of life, since even for Bloch’s model to work, we need, not just the microscopic things and their laws, but also the experimental context, such as provided by the lattice structure which is essential to even specify the problem. In such contexts, yes, once we specify the macroscopic context we have something like Conway’s Game of Life going on. We can tell how much and what sort of electricity we are going to measure from the microscopic description of the electrons.