Live data from Hacker News

The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

jsomers.net

31–40 of 225 posts

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#31

Incredible to think how something this intricate with so many interdependent parts and integrated systems could have evolved.

The thing that makes it difficult to imagine is that the large numbers involved are hard to imagine.

In a given teaspoon of ocean water in the top layer, there are millions of bacteria (in soil there can be up to 1 billion). Each one lives for a day or two before it either divides or is consumed, with a handful of mutations at each round of division. So ~200 divisions a year, for three billion years, with selection stochastically whittling out the few good mutations the crop up now and then, in a diversity of changing ecosystems and you end up with where we are today. Oh, and the occasional horizontal gene transfer for extra spice.

Obviously that is a large hand wave -- the numbers above are from today's environment; early on the biotic density was lower. But the large numbers swamp things. The only real mystery is how things initially got started. But again, it is hard to imagine the time scale involved and the wide variety of environments that exist over the time to imagine the happy accident where the first self-replicating molecule just happen in the right environment that was stable enough for long enough for that self replication to gain traction.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#32

On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".

How does a water droplet "know" the path downhill. How does electricity "know" the least resistance path.

All this language is just confusing. In a chemical gradient sense, molds and yeasts solve tough problems all the time, but it's not much more than physics

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#33

From a laymans perspective, can human beings create our own version of DNA, let's say with the use of transistors instead of biological cells, long into the future? Or is DNA just magic and we can't recreate it inside solid state objects like a robot made out of transistors?

It’s not magic, we can synthesize DNA. But we don’t yet have the kind of nanotechnology that cells do.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#34

On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".

I think intelligence is the correct word. Why not?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#35

On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".

How does a water droplet "know" the path downhill. How does electricity "know" the least resistance path. All this language is just confusing. In a chemical gradient sense, molds and yeasts solve tough problems all the time, but it's not much more than physics

How many simple physics combinations until you get intelligence? Remember that you are made of cells, and everything you do (probably) can be reduced to a group effect of your cells.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#36

On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".

How does a water droplet "know" the path downhill. How does electricity "know" the least resistance path. All this language is just confusing. In a chemical gradient sense, molds and yeasts solve tough problems all the time, but it's not much more than physics

If it's more than physics at all, what's the extra bit?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#37
post #29
post #5

There is a section at the end "How did we figure all this stuff out?". Really amazing. And the scale invariance of nature is clearly visible here. The cell is "small" compared to human scale but it is as complicated as any machine existing in human scale. There is no absolute small or big in nature.

It is a lot more complex than anything made by humans, but it is nothing like as complicated as a human that consists of a huge number of cells.

Technically humans are also made by humans :)

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#38
> We don’t yet have the technology to just observe all of the activity inside a living cell.

How close are we to being able to make a map of all atoms within a cell? There are 1E23 atoms in 1 ml of water, and an ecoli is about 500nmx500nmx1um. That means there are only about 2E10 atoms in the whole cell!

Would it be possible to somehow freeze a whole cell, then use an electron beam to knock off and identify (via mass) every atom there?

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a water droplet "know" the path downhill. How does electricity "know" the least resistance path. All this language is just confusing. In a chemical gradient sense, molds and yeasts solve tough problems all the time, but it's not much more than physics

How many simple physics combinations until you get intelligence? Remember that you are made of cells, and everything you do (probably) can be reduced to a group effect of your cells.

Complexity is not magic. It's just a long search for the right combo. In fact we have untold trillions of branching iterations in evolution.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#40
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a water droplet "know" the path downhill. How does electricity "know" the least resistance path. All this language is just confusing. In a chemical gradient sense, molds and yeasts solve tough problems all the time, but it's not much more than physics

If it's more than physics at all, what's the extra bit?

Well, I guess a fancy narrative.
Post reply on HN