How does an organ cell collaborates with others to perform a specific function if the cell itself lacks the intelligence to understand the greater propose?
In: Biology
No cell is aware of its role in a greater organism. It simply follows a set of pre-determined instructions (defined by the DNA it receives). It can receive inputs from outside itself, it can send outputs into that same extracellular space, and it can change itself (such as a muscle cell contracting). If the cell was sapient, it would think that it was the only living entity in an endless void, occasionally receiving messages it doesn’t know the origin of and sending messages it doesn’t know the recipient of. All it knows is that it has a set of instructions it must follow, and it always follows them.
Simple cells with no awareness of the outside world diligently following instructions can still contribute to a greater organism completely unaware that’s what they’re doing, because each has instructions that can receive input signals and produce output signals. It doesn’t need to have an intention in the signal it sends, as long as the recipient cell has instructions about what to do upon receiving the signal.
To give a very simplified analogy, imagine you have a set of dominoes all lined up in a domino run. Each of those has no idea it’s part of a domino run. All it can do is fall when pushed, but it falling triggers the next domino to fall, and the next and the next and so on. Each domino is simply waiting, thinking “When I get pushed I’ll fall” (metaphorically speaking – they’re not literally thinking) and because this rule can take the falling of a previous domino as the pushing signal, the entire domino run falls with no single domino having any idea that such a domino run existed or that the entire domino run falling was the end goal of this simple rule.
Basically, it doesn’t. The cell has no idea it’s collaborating. It’s the arrangement of interacting cells that performs the specific function. That’s an emergent property of the whole assembly of cells that’s been refined over several billion years of evolution by an elaborate form of guess & test.
It’s like asking a die how it knows if it’s playing Monopoly in your living room or high-stakes craps in Las Vegas…it has no idea. It just does what it does in response to it’s immediate surroundings. It’s only when you embed it in a much larger system of other objects & interactions that you get something we’d call a greater purpose.
Edit: Cells do communicate with cells around them (and the larger organism) through chemicals. However, they have no idea who’s “sending” the chemicals, they can just see what bumps up against the cell. That could be the cell next door, like a nerve triggering an adjacent nerve, or many feet away like hormones from your pituitary causing a growth plate in your bones to grow. Likewise, the cell “sending” the chemical has no idea what it’s for or where it’s going, it just does it.
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