<story><title>The Ferocious Complexity of the Cell</title><url>https://rbharath.github.io/the-ferocious-complexity-of-the-cell/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>entee</author><text>One of the major misunderstandings even many biologists have about how a cell works is a complete misconception of how jam-packed and dynamic a living cell actually is. See the following images for a pretty simulation of what a cell actually &amp;quot;looks&amp;quot; like on the inside:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mgl.scripps.edu&amp;#x2F;people&amp;#x2F;goodsell&amp;#x2F;books&amp;#x2F;MoL2figures&amp;#x2F;Figure8.2-reduced.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mgl.scripps.edu&amp;#x2F;people&amp;#x2F;goodsell&amp;#x2F;books&amp;#x2F;MoL2figures&amp;#x2F;Fig...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Webpage with more info:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;occamstypewriter.org&amp;#x2F;scurry&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;the_crowded_cell&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;occamstypewriter.org&amp;#x2F;scurry&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;the_crowded_ce...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Physicists&amp;#x2F;chemists often make fun of biology as &amp;quot;blob-logy&amp;quot; because we tend to draw biological systems as Blob-1 interacting with Blob-2 which leads to a change in Blob-3. It&amp;#x27;s a very useful abstraction, but it&amp;#x27;s also limited. In reality all these blobs are jammed together and moving around, creating a lot of random noise in the system. This is because every component in a cell is working at nano-scale (proteins are to a 1st approximation about 5nm in diameter). The rules are different at that scale, we don&amp;#x27;t experience anything like them in our daily lives.&lt;p&gt;In other words, the components of the cell aren&amp;#x27;t doing chemistry at a bench, passing the results of one reaction to the next reaction, it&amp;#x27;s more like doing chemistry in a mosh pit.&lt;p&gt;Biology has developed coping mechanisms for this insanity, but analogies drawn with things like computer processors and macro-world items are going to be somewhat wrong because of the inherent differences in scale.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Ferocious Complexity of the Cell</title><url>https://rbharath.github.io/the-ferocious-complexity-of-the-cell/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianN</author><text>This article seems to equate &amp;quot;exhaustively understand&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;can be simulated down to an atomic level&amp;quot;. I think that&amp;#x27;s not a good way to go about it. A cube of silicon with 1cm side length has about 10^20 atoms. Storing one bit for each atom would use exabytes of memory. Luckily, we don&amp;#x27;t have to simulate the cube at that level of precision to get a pretty good idea about how it behaves.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;we could just simulate the whole brain down to the quarks&amp;quot; argument is an argument for the existence of AI. Nobody seriously suggests that it&amp;#x27;s the practical path forward to achieving it.</text></comment>