Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

  • stoneparchment@possumpat.io
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    9 months ago

    When I say “the cell isn’t a machine”, it is in specific reference to the machine model of the cell, which is a previously established conceptual framework in the field of molecular biology. If you want to understand why that model is falling out of favor today, you’re invited to read the article linked by OP and/or the articles I have linked in other comments.

    The gist is that the cell is more complicated, flexible, and emergent than any machine has ever been and will be for the foreseeable future, and the idea that we can simply map the functions of each molecule in the cell to get a perfect “circuit diagram” of how everything plays together is defunct.

    I don’t have time to mess with this thread any more. You can either accept what myself (an expert in this field), the author of this publication (which happens to be one of the most prestigious journals in the world), and others who do this research daily are saying about this, or you can not. Frankly, if you are an expert also, the field, the research, and the truth barely cares about our opinion-- it certainly doesn’t care about non-expert opinions on the internet.