July 06, 2006

Cell Intelligence This website is organized with a table of contents. One finds some radical claims in the first section, and I was at first put off by this. On second look, I found it useful to go deeper into the later parts to assess the information on the site, much of which I found intriguing.
posted by Scary Corn Imp 18 years ago
  • He seems to be approaching the issue of cell behavior with preconceived notions. This is a well-known problem in fringe sceince. You start with some theory then look for "evidence" to support it, ignoring alternative explanations and data that contradicts your theory.
  • He seems to be approaching the issue of cell behavior with preconceived notions. This is a well-known problem in fringe sceince. You start with some theory then look for "evidence" to support it, ignoring alternative explanations and data that contradicts your theory. That's the Scientific Method. ALL scientists start off with a pre-concieved notion (the more PC term for that is a hypothesis, btw).
  • The question is whether or not you are willing to be proved totally wrong and how rigourous and reproducible your results are. Results that only happen once do not constitute science. Results that require faith are not science either.
  • I didn't know the scientific method prescribed disregarding anything that contradicted your hypothesis. Guess I need to go and hand my Ph.D. back to my thesis committee.
  • And yes, the problem isn't the preeconcieved notion, the problem is going to any length to hold onto it in the face of evidence to the contrary. We're very, very, very often wrong with our "favored" hypothesis. Thats why we always have another one on hand as backup.
  • [quote]Cells can 'see', i.e. they can map the directions of near-infrared light sources in their environment and direct their movements toward them. No such 'vision' is possible without a very sophisticated signal processing system ('cell brain') that is linked to the movement control of the cell. (The larger their light scattering, the larger the distance from which aggregating cells came together. )[/quote] I guess he's never seen superfluid helium-3. And I'd have to agree, cells have a rudimentary sort of intelligence, encoded in a network of interactions, but his thesis doesn't seem to be making a lot of testable predictions. I mean, if the centromeres were the brain of the cell, and we remove them (with either drugs that disrupt them, or an siRNA ... because they are required for cell division), do the cells lose their vision? No publications (that I saw), just a bunch of pontificating and hand-waving. Yay.
  • I take it back, the guy did have a lot of publications. Well, he's quite a heretic.
  • Amazing. I think he's right about the centrioles. Wow. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=search&term=albrecht-buehler He's done an experiment where he irradiates them with infrared light from a second source, and effectively blinds them. I would have done the experiment differently, but it adds a lot of support to his thesis. Still think his website is an awful mishmash of conjecture with little experimental support, but medline doesn't lie. He's tested these ideas out.
  • the way I-we-they look at it I'm just a colony of cells each one wants to see cells thrive and stay alive (o golly, that means me!) to make more cells ... by whatever means I or they or we can contrive
  • > That's the Scientific Method. ALL scientists start off with a pre-concieved notion well, some start with data and derive hypotheses. the Scientific Method doesn't require preconceived ideas, though for pratical purposes much research is based upon them.
  • pratical -> practical
  • pratt!
  • prat chat?