What is your view of reductionism?

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Dennett has some excellent analysis of this stuff in Kinds of Minds chapter 2, which I posted in another thread below. Basically, hes saying that we can best understand biological organisms at a level higher than chemistry/physics(just like Mayer is saying), by treating the molecules and organisms as rational agents. He calls this "the Intentional Stance".

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I come to agree with this position and not only with respect to the biology. There is a gap between physics and chemistry too. To be good in chemistry one needs to develop proper 'chemistry' intuition, we can't just make quantum mechanical calculation and predict everything. We actually have to work quite independently on each level of matter organisation.

It seems to be a universal feature for all the sciences.

[m_the0ry]

I disagree with this author's view.

The field of molecular dynamics essentially complete enough, it has made incredible predictions. The problem is simply one of massive computational power. Take a look at folding@home. From their website,

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it takes about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, proteins fold on the tens of microsecond timescale (10,000 nanoseconds). Thus, it would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding -- i.e. it would take 30 CPU years! That's a long time to wait for one result!

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Saying biology from physical laws 'cannot' be done is ridiculous. In fact, I would argue that we will reach a point where most all biological insights are reached by this level of simulation. The molecular and cellular abstractions will always be invaluable to biologists, but when computers become fast enough the inaccuracies of abstraction will no longer be necessary.

We are a long way off from modeling a single cell. Quantum computing will absolutely be necessary.