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?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.