  A recently proposed molecular model is discussed as a non-trivial extension
of the Ising model. For d=2 the two models are shown to be equivalent, while
for d>2 the molecular model describes a peculiar second order transition from
an isotropic high temperature phase to a low-dimensional anisotropic low
temperature state. The general mean field analysis is compared with the results
achieved by a variational Migdal-Kadanoff real space renormalization group
method and by standard Monte Carlo sampling for d=3. By finite size scaling the
critical exponent has been found to be 0.44\pm 0.02 thus establishing that the
molecular model does not belong to the universality class of the Ising model
for d>2.
