How many times a day do we hear this? Just wait, eventually, sooner or later, some day, all of biology will be explained by means of physical causes, and physical causes alone!
Seems reasonable to me. 100 years ago, we didn't know the medium of genetic information. 50 years ago we had just learned the very basics of that information. Today we know the sequence of the entire human genome, and those of several hundred other organisms.
100 years ago we really didn't know what an enzyme was. 50 years ago we were learning the physical structures of the first enzymes. Today, we're getting close to determining the structure of the entire proteome (all of the proteins that are ever expressed in a living cell.)
100 years ago, we knew a very small part of the chemistry of the living cell. 50 years ago we had worked out the most basic pathways. Today they've coined the word 'metabolome' (the sum total of all the metabolic chemistry of the organism).
We're no more than 20 years away from a complete, mechanistic description of the entire life-cycle of a bacterial cell. That means you will be able to put an E. coli cell into a computer, set it going, and predict everything about it - structure, chemistry, constituents, reproduction, etc., using deterministic physical equations. I doubt any credible scientist doubts this will happen.
Fortunately, not all scientists are willing to hold their breath while they wait for this grand culmination to occur. Here's Dr. Grandpierre's view of the matter: "When physics applies the maxim of ignorance, and ignores biological inputs to fit the closure thesis, it misses the main point of the problem. Moreover, the physicalist dogma that 'one day we will be able to determine the actual behavior of living organisms by exclusively physical methods when all the physical details of the most complex organisms of the universe will be clarified' merely postpones the aim to solve the scientific questions of biology by plausible and simple scientific methods to an indeterminately distant future.
Dr. Grandpierre will likely be proven wrong in his own lifetime.
When you consider that the human organism is made up of roughly 6*1013 cells, and in each cell more than 105 chemical reactions occur per second, which generally involve localized, "neighbor relations"; and yet the living system is able to organize and integrate all of its astronomically large number of parts distributed throughout its physical extent into one single, dynamic, self-organizing, sensitively-responsive global whole -- well, you've got to figure an enormous amount of information is required
On the other hand, the amount of knowledge is increasing exponentially. Computer power is increasing exponentially. It took us less than 100 years from the time we figured out where the genome was, to a complete description of it. As I've said, I doubt it will take us even 20 more years to figure out a single cell.
Scarier still, though, the gaps left for guys like Grandpierre to bloviate about are getting smaller and smaller. We reductionists will inherit the earth, and the last will and testament has already been written.
(Insert obligatory evil laugh here)
It seems very likely to me that Dr. Grandpierre is not in the business of exploiting the remaining gaps so that he can bloviate. It also seems very likely to me that he is as good a historian of science as you are, and possibly a far better one. (He gets all the way back to ancient Greece on occasion; there were some pretty superb thinkers operating back then, as I'm sure you'll recall.) Plus he is not making up this stuff as he goes along: There is a tremendous collegial effort going on here, speaking of the contemporary situation of state-of-the-art science, and also of the ages-long historical evolution of science itself.
Stay tuned!
Charming, RWP!!! OK, i can get into the spirit of this thing: certainly the last will and testament has been written already. :^) That happens to be an essential Christian understanding -- as you well know. Switching gears into that road (which you yourself suggested would be fun to go down), what is the basis for your saying that reductionists will inherit the earth? Good grief, it seems to me you guys are steadily "reducing yourselves away" into that absolute reduction that spells "impending nothingness."
But oh jeepers, I'm mixing up my science and theology here again.... (At your invitation!)
Thanks for writing, RWP!
Not sure I agree with you--due to constraints on CPU power, and due to not knowing what level of detail you want to model.
Getting accurate values for the force constants and potential energy surface for each individual bond in an entire protein is going to be quite a chore--even for the protein in isolation, let alone allowing for perturbations in the structure due to changes in the local environment (e.g. close approach of lone pairs on a water molecule within the cell, ion transport, etc.)
Cheers!