Living cells communicate (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, October 05, 2012, 14:38 (4410 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: A new experimental way to study that communication. Life is very complex:
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> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cellular-calls-listening&WT.mc_id=... 
> Here is a quote from the article that fairly leaps off the page: 
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> "Some signals instruct cells to grow and multiply; others "say" it is time to die. And some signals encourage stem cells—which can mature into a variety of cell types—to differentiate into specific lineages. Understanding cellular signaling is key for biologists hoping to discover how cells respond to one another and their environment."
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> On 13 December 2011, Page 10 of this forum, I opened a thread on the subject of The Intelligent Cell, and suggested that this might form the basic mechanism of evolution. ......it seems to me that this latest discovery, together with continuing advances in epigenetics, offers one more piece of evidence that there is an intelligent mechanism at work here which may explain not just adaptation but also, and all importantly, innovation. -I bolded that brief phrase so that I could ask the same question I always pose: How did the intelligen mechanism arise? Doesn't intelligence mean a mind was at work?- 
> I don't see this as being contrary to Darwinism. -I don't blame Darwin. He could only work with the facts he had. But Alfred Russel Wallace had a much clearer intrepretation. He saw the intelligence behind it all in his book and other writings.-
> I have never understood why he insisted that his theory depended on gradualism, or indeed why the title of his masterpiece states that species originate "by means of natural selection"-He studied the breeders who achieved slow and gradual change and were the 'natural selectors'.-> but in the light of modern science 150 years later, his basic insight still stands up to scientific scrutiny: namely, that all forms of life evolved from earlier forms through diversification and suitability to existing environments. These new discoveries are on the way to explaining how.-It is very difficult to deny evolution occurred.
 
> In the context of design versus chance, his own agnostic open-mindedness also stands up to scientific scrutiny. Even he could never have dreamt how complex the mechanisms of heredity etc. would prove to be. The belief that these could somehow be attributed to chance clearly has no more basis in science than the belief that it was all designed by an eternal, universal, unobservable and inexplicable intelligence.-Since you don't accept either choice, is there a third modality? Ah, I know, that painful picket fence! Because there is no other choice.