If Barrow is being serious then the comment is ridiculous. It's definitely not "on the mark", simply because biology is a science.
Chiroptera writes:
This is (or was) especially true for those in fields like particle physics -- you would be astounded by the level of arrogance in those fields.
There is sociological reasons for this related to the enormous rapid success of the standard model in the 1970s. However a few things:
(1)It genuinely is a rare attitude outside particle physics. For instance few condensed matter people would think it.
(2)It was much more common ten years ago. Today's students are growing up with obvious biological success stories, like the human genome project.
In general though anybody who doesn't grow out of opinions like that after undergraduate is, at the very least, a bit immature.