Intelligent Design
Molecular Animation Reveals the Machinery — Yes, Machinery — of Life
Readers may recall, back in June 2010, Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boundry expressing their strong dislike for machine metaphors in science (see also Paul Nelson’s remarks on their statement here). Pigliucci and Boundry said that,
…if we want to keep Intelligent Design out of the classroom, not only do we have to exclude the “theory” from the biology curriculum, but we also have to be weary [sic] of using scientific metaphors that bolster design-like misconceptions about living systems. We argue that the machine-information metaphor in biology not only misleads students and the public at large, but cannot but direct even the thinking of the scientists involved, and therefore the sort of questions they decide to pursue and how they approach them.
I shudder to think what Pigliucci and Boundry might have to say about this molecular visualization.