"Endoplasmic reticulum" is my current favorite thing. Anyone remember the first Sim City game? The little text when loading a map sometimes said "reticulating splines" and I never knew what that meant but thought it was awesome anyways.
So in my bio quest, I've returned to an earlier chapter. 28 and 29 gave a very zoomed out view of the evolution of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but I needed to return to basics, since on the first pass, my eyes were kinda glazed over. So I'm reading about endoplasmic reticulum and the ribosomes embedded on it, and how proteins get sent to the Golgi Apparatus... And here I find a philosophical problem.
Over the past several years, my philosophy has roughly developed along the lines of, "the map is not the territory." This is so useful... And can be applied to almost anything. It jives well with Kantian philosophy, tarot, Christianity, theurgy... Just, everything. But those especially. Also bitcoiners used to say it a lot. Bring that back... But now in biology, the problem is that the map is definitely the territory. I regularly stop and exclaim, "but how does it know!?!?" The operations of the Golgi Apparatus is one such point.
So, what happens is, first segments of DNA that encode the needed proteins are grouped into the ribosomes on the endoplasmic reticulum, where they execute and make a protein. Then the protein gets ferried over to the Golgi Apparatus, where it goes in one side and exits the other side slightly modified - usually a short suger is added, and that modification acts as an address label. The label (a molecule) tells a "vescicle" - a different molecule, which acts as a mailman, where to take the protein. Then it gets assimilated into whatever structure its taken to, and that's how cells grow or repair. But here's the recurring problem : where's the corresponding information stored? Like, okay, the short sugar addition is the label, I see how its added and taken off, but a label has to correspond to some inverse receiving function, and I'm not seeing that in the vescicles. Is the whole thing based on the probability of a molecule randomly finding a receiving corresponding shape to fit into? If that's how it works, then why add it to a vescicle first? And if that's how it works, then each organelle - nay, each component of each organelle - must have a unique key to prevent proteins from going to the wrong place.
Well anyways. I suppose if the answers were easy, there'd be no bio quest. Yeah, backwards logic, but it's all I got here. The quest continues....
So in my bio quest, I've returned to an earlier chapter. 28 and 29 gave a very zoomed out view of the evolution of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but I needed to return to basics, since on the first pass, my eyes were kinda glazed over. So I'm reading about endoplasmic reticulum and the ribosomes embedded on it, and how proteins get sent to the Golgi Apparatus... And here I find a philosophical problem.
Over the past several years, my philosophy has roughly developed along the lines of, "the map is not the territory." This is so useful... And can be applied to almost anything. It jives well with Kantian philosophy, tarot, Christianity, theurgy... Just, everything. But those especially. Also bitcoiners used to say it a lot. Bring that back... But now in biology, the problem is that the map is definitely the territory. I regularly stop and exclaim, "but how does it know!?!?" The operations of the Golgi Apparatus is one such point.
So, what happens is, first segments of DNA that encode the needed proteins are grouped into the ribosomes on the endoplasmic reticulum, where they execute and make a protein. Then the protein gets ferried over to the Golgi Apparatus, where it goes in one side and exits the other side slightly modified - usually a short suger is added, and that modification acts as an address label. The label (a molecule) tells a "vescicle" - a different molecule, which acts as a mailman, where to take the protein. Then it gets assimilated into whatever structure its taken to, and that's how cells grow or repair. But here's the recurring problem : where's the corresponding information stored? Like, okay, the short sugar addition is the label, I see how its added and taken off, but a label has to correspond to some inverse receiving function, and I'm not seeing that in the vescicles. Is the whole thing based on the probability of a molecule randomly finding a receiving corresponding shape to fit into? If that's how it works, then why add it to a vescicle first? And if that's how it works, then each organelle - nay, each component of each organelle - must have a unique key to prevent proteins from going to the wrong place.
Well anyways. I suppose if the answers were easy, there'd be no bio quest. Yeah, backwards logic, but it's all I got here. The quest continues....
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