Feb 4, 2005; Biology 2005 Albert HarrisImagine a magical house, in which each of the bricks of the walls is alive, and capable of locomotion and exerting mechanical forces. Each brick "wants" to be part of a wall, and climbs up other bricks, and puts itself in the right position. The shingles of the roof are also alive, have properties that make them become very flat and thin, and they crawl up to the tops of brick walls, and extend themselves to form a roof. The tiles of the floor are also alive, but prefer to crawl downward, flatten onto the ground, and stick to each other around their edges, to form a floor. In addition, some of the bricks of the walls have an ability to become transparent to form windows. Do you want to hear about the special chimney-forming brick cells, and the pipe cells that become hollow? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????? What if a hurricane or tornado blows this house down, leaving just a pile of randomly-mixed bricks, tiles, shingles etc. Will the response to such demolition be the same no matter what particular methods or combinations of methods that the magic bricks, shingles, tiles etc. use to position themselves? Should we think about embryonic development as a matter of signal transmission, by which each cell is told what to do and where to do it? Or is that analogy anthropomorphic, and should we ask what properties cells have (caused by genes, of course) that cause the cells to arrange in geometric patterns, etc.
|