Essentially does each cell think on its own? How does it know how to interact with other cells? Does it have any sort of intelligence other than do the one job it has? How does it know to have that job?
In: Biology
It is living, but it’s not a sentient, conscious organism. It runs on instinct essentially. It took billions of years for organisms to evolve into what they are now. So it has billions of years of information of what to do instinctively.
It is not it’s own living organism because it cannot function and survive without other cells.
In the human body, immune cells come to mind. Some types essentially get to freely move around and monitor the rest of our cells to check that everything looks right. You can look up videos of white blood cells moving around and they look like little amoebas unlike most of our cells that are locked in as tissues.
Sperm cells are another cell type that can behave somewhat independently and are basically a separate organism (as they potentially become an offspring). In humans, our sperm aren’t that impressive, but if you look at other organisms that have *alternating generations* then their gametes get to go on and have their own little haploid lives before eventually fertilizing and becoming a diploid again.
A body cell isn’t an individual organism like a bacterium would be. They’re dependent on the rest of the body working together. Bacteria can survive just fine solo and get all their nutrients on their own. Your individual cells can’t do that. That’s why your body has so many different systems, because different cells have different jobs but they’re all interconnected to keep the whole machine running.
So think of body cells as components while a single cell organism is a whole machine.
Technically yes but also technically no.
I heard Hank Green say there was a dog that had its cancer mutate and become airborne. Literally 1 step away from transmissible to other dogs and it’s legit just DNA and cells from that dog.
The definition of organism is actually extremely broad and loosely used.
Some will say yes, some will say no. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter.
On the topic of how they do that imagine the cells and their surroundings full of tiny magnets.
1 magnet is not very useful on its own but get another one and now you can attract or repulse each other, add another one and now you can make them change direction, add a lot more and you can make them travel long distances (like magnetic trains), flip them, change their form and even more crazy stuff, but the magnets are still dumb pieces of metal.
Now imagine instead of 2 different magnets, North pole and South pole, you have billions, the proteins and enzymes cells are made of and surrounded with, and you can imagine all the combinations and possibilities doable by just dumb cells
Biology is beautiful, fantastic, and extremely complicated. These questions you’re asking are incredibly difficult to answer, most of them we do not have complete answers to.
1. Yes, cells are by definition “living” – they can generate their own energy (given food), grow, and reproduce. They do not “think” in the same way a large animal does.
2. Inside a cell, millions of chemical reactions are occuring that help the cell do it’s job. It is a remarkably complex, miraculous system where chemicals literally just float around, and happen to interact with their correct counterpart. The chemicals literally just float around, and happen to bump into another chemical and do something productive for the cell. Of course, the cells evolved over a long period of time so that only the cells that produced the right chemicals at the right time survive. But it’s still miraculous.
Just, perhaps, a short introduction to a cell:
– The cell membrane is a special “wall” of molecules that surround the cell, make it a little sphere that separates the inside from the outside. Now the cell can control what’s inside it.
– The nucleus, contains the DNA – Incredibly long molecules who’s molecular sequence contains the code for building Proteins
– RNA, specialized proteins who carry DNA information and build the Proteins
– Proteins are the real magic of the cell. Very specialized strands of molecules that carry out all the specialized needs of a cell. The proteins define the behavior of the cell.
More than half of your weight is bacteria that isn’t you. So when Thanos snapped his fingers most people would lose 1/4 of their weight and just die. Or maybe the bacteria went through mitosis and he was just fine. Statistics will protect you from angry space grimmace and his magic glove.
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