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
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.
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