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 In contrast to fundamental physics, consider the project being pursued by one of the special sciences—say, molecular biology. Molecular biologists are certainly not interested in identifying patterns that hold everywhere in the universe; biologists have relatively little to say about what happens inside the sun (except perhaps to note that the conditions would make it difficult for life to prosper there). They are, instead, concerned with the behavior of a relatively small sub-set of regions of the universe. So far, the patterns they’ve identified have been observed to hold only on some parts of Earth, and that only in the last few billion years. It’s clearly no criticism of molecular biology to point out that it has nothing to say on the subject of what happens inside a black hole—that kind of system is (by design) outside molecular biology’s domain of interest. Just as in the case of S$1-2$ above, this restriction of domain lets molecular biologists focus their efforts on identifying patterns that, while they aren’t universal, facilitate predictions about how a very large class of physical systems behave.

What exactly is the domain of inquiry with which molecular biology is concerned? That is, how do molecular biologists carve up the world so that the patterns they identify hold of systems included in that carving? It is rather unusual (to put it mildly) for the creation of a domain in this sense to be a rapid, deliberate act on the part of working scientists. It is unusual, that is, for a group of people to sit down around a table (metaphorical or otherwise), pick out a heretofore

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