Two or more products with differing costs for each producer
Consumption
A coordinating mechanism
Scientific hierarchy and specialization. When a new graduate student does wet lab work for a PI in a large and well-funded lab, they’re generally foregoing only an opportunity to do wet lab work somewhere else. They don’t have the resources, scientific knowledge base, or position to pursue their own high-level research strategy, even if they had one. If a well-funded PI were to do wet lab work, they’d be giving up time they could be devoting to high-impact strategy work. Hence, even though the PI might be better at the bench than any of their graduate students, they nevertheless don’t actually do any wet lab work themselves. On occasion, though, they might step in to perform a critical procedure in a crunch if the assigned grad student isn’t able to do it.
Furthermore, successful labs probably specialize not only to advance the state of the art in their field, but also in order to be able to provide services to other labs. If lab A is run by a highly competent PI who has a large but limited supply of labor and capital, they could develop competency in any of a wide range of advanced skills and techniques. But if lab B, even if run by a modestly competent PI, can specialize in a component of work relevant to lab A, then they might have a comparative advantage in that area. Lab A will let them have it, so that they can produce more of the things lab B is not able to do.
Hibernation vs. winter foraging. Ground squirrels hibernate; hares do not. One speculative explanation is that, in energy-sparse environments, species specialize not only in different particular food sources, but in different seasons. Hares specialize in exploiting winter food sources; ground squirrels specialize in maximally exploiting summer resources through more complex patterns of behavior. In a sense, they’re finding different comparative advantages. They may evolve with these patterns in a way that reflects a sort of “evolutionary trade.” Hares focusing on a pattern of energy consumption and expenditure that can run at a uniform moderate level, sustainable in summer against competition from lots of hungry squirrels, and also in winter when food sources are scarce. Squirrels focus on a pattern that maximally exploits abundant summer resources, and then shuts down during the winter, “leaving the rest” for the hares. This isn’t symbiosis, and it’s not just “specialization” in the narrow sense of, say, growing a beak adapted to a particular flower shape. Beak specialization is equivalent to a firm producing better tools for its workers to do the job it’s focused on; hibernation vs. winter foraging lifestyles are equivalent to the process by which firms choose which jobs to focus on in the first place.
Can we apply other economic principles to understand evolution and predict or explain patterns in our observations? We might use “market size” to understand the evolution of multicellular organisms. The more cells we have in the body, the more they’re able to specialize. This predicts that we’d find increased cellular diversity in larger organisms, even within analogous organs.
Cellular differentiation. Pluripotency and mature function are two different cell “products.” Stem cells can offer cheap pluripotency, but it’s expensive for them to differentiate all the way to maturity. Partially differentiated cells can reach maturity in a narrower set of endpoints cheaply, but cannot naturally revert to pluripotency (as far as I know). The body uses these cells, and coordinates their reproduction, differentiation, and maturation.
This makes me curious about the extent to which cellular proliferation and differentiation is controlled vs. incentivized. The body is certainly heavily controlled by intercellular signaling, which controls the behavior of cells. This is analogous to a command economy. When, if ever, is the body regulated (in a healthy way, i.e. not cancer) by creating “rewards” of energy or oxygen to select for cells maximally able to exploit that reward?
On cellular signalling: “control by intercellular signalling” is not necessarily analogous to a command economy. After all, even in a market economy, we have lots of interagent signalling in the form of e.g. prices. Indeed, many hormones function quite similarly to prices (i.e. they signal abundance or scarcity of an associated resource), and biological signalling is largely decentralized—different organs specialize in different signals and their associated functions. The “rewards” need not be energy or oxygen or even growth of a cell population; indeed, we don’t necessarily need a “reward” signal at the cellular level at all in order for the economic analogy to apply. That’s part of the idea of this post: we can apply comparative advantage (and opportunity cost, markets, etc) even when the “subsystems” are not themselves optimizers which “want” anything. There can be just one “central” set of pareto-optimization objectives, but the optimization is implemented in a decentralized way by “trading” until the opportunity costs of different subsystems equilibrate.
Yes, the market analogy seems like a valuable one to lean into. Textbooks tend to focus on a control systems approach to describing protein and cellular regulation and action. The body is viewed as an intricate machine, which is not designed, but has a design determined by evolutionary forces which acts to achieve functions conducive to reproduction. This tends to make me frame cells and proteins as components of a machine, which only gain an independent “agency” of their own in the case of cancer.
I can see two broad strategies for incorporating this into our understanding.
One is for communication and study purposes. By using familiar and vivid frames, we might be able to teach about biology in a more compelling manner.
This seems useful, but even better would be to use economic frames to derive truly novel insights. In my lab, control systems are the dominant framework for understanding the systems under study. It’s a large, old, world-class lab populated by scientists who are smarter and more experienced than me, so I find it likely that this tradition has resulted at least in part from its massive, sustained, demonstrated utility.
What sort of predictions or strategies can we make by using economic frames, beyond simply repackaging known mechanisms into novel language and analogies? How can economic frames lead us to concrete experimental techniques in order to test and build on these novel insights? What are the challenges and limitations of an economic framing of cellular biology?
General system components:
Two or more producers
Two or more products with differing costs for each producer
Consumption
A coordinating mechanism
Scientific hierarchy and specialization. When a new graduate student does wet lab work for a PI in a large and well-funded lab, they’re generally foregoing only an opportunity to do wet lab work somewhere else. They don’t have the resources, scientific knowledge base, or position to pursue their own high-level research strategy, even if they had one. If a well-funded PI were to do wet lab work, they’d be giving up time they could be devoting to high-impact strategy work. Hence, even though the PI might be better at the bench than any of their graduate students, they nevertheless don’t actually do any wet lab work themselves. On occasion, though, they might step in to perform a critical procedure in a crunch if the assigned grad student isn’t able to do it.
Furthermore, successful labs probably specialize not only to advance the state of the art in their field, but also in order to be able to provide services to other labs. If lab A is run by a highly competent PI who has a large but limited supply of labor and capital, they could develop competency in any of a wide range of advanced skills and techniques. But if lab B, even if run by a modestly competent PI, can specialize in a component of work relevant to lab A, then they might have a comparative advantage in that area. Lab A will let them have it, so that they can produce more of the things lab B is not able to do.
Hibernation vs. winter foraging. Ground squirrels hibernate; hares do not. One speculative explanation is that, in energy-sparse environments, species specialize not only in different particular food sources, but in different seasons. Hares specialize in exploiting winter food sources; ground squirrels specialize in maximally exploiting summer resources through more complex patterns of behavior. In a sense, they’re finding different comparative advantages. They may evolve with these patterns in a way that reflects a sort of “evolutionary trade.” Hares focusing on a pattern of energy consumption and expenditure that can run at a uniform moderate level, sustainable in summer against competition from lots of hungry squirrels, and also in winter when food sources are scarce. Squirrels focus on a pattern that maximally exploits abundant summer resources, and then shuts down during the winter, “leaving the rest” for the hares. This isn’t symbiosis, and it’s not just “specialization” in the narrow sense of, say, growing a beak adapted to a particular flower shape. Beak specialization is equivalent to a firm producing better tools for its workers to do the job it’s focused on; hibernation vs. winter foraging lifestyles are equivalent to the process by which firms choose which jobs to focus on in the first place.
Can we apply other economic principles to understand evolution and predict or explain patterns in our observations? We might use “market size” to understand the evolution of multicellular organisms. The more cells we have in the body, the more they’re able to specialize. This predicts that we’d find increased cellular diversity in larger organisms, even within analogous organs.
Cellular differentiation. Pluripotency and mature function are two different cell “products.” Stem cells can offer cheap pluripotency, but it’s expensive for them to differentiate all the way to maturity. Partially differentiated cells can reach maturity in a narrower set of endpoints cheaply, but cannot naturally revert to pluripotency (as far as I know). The body uses these cells, and coordinates their reproduction, differentiation, and maturation.
This makes me curious about the extent to which cellular proliferation and differentiation is controlled vs. incentivized. The body is certainly heavily controlled by intercellular signaling, which controls the behavior of cells. This is analogous to a command economy. When, if ever, is the body regulated (in a healthy way, i.e. not cancer) by creating “rewards” of energy or oxygen to select for cells maximally able to exploit that reward?
I like the insights on research specialization.
On cellular signalling: “control by intercellular signalling” is not necessarily analogous to a command economy. After all, even in a market economy, we have lots of interagent signalling in the form of e.g. prices. Indeed, many hormones function quite similarly to prices (i.e. they signal abundance or scarcity of an associated resource), and biological signalling is largely decentralized—different organs specialize in different signals and their associated functions. The “rewards” need not be energy or oxygen or even growth of a cell population; indeed, we don’t necessarily need a “reward” signal at the cellular level at all in order for the economic analogy to apply. That’s part of the idea of this post: we can apply comparative advantage (and opportunity cost, markets, etc) even when the “subsystems” are not themselves optimizers which “want” anything. There can be just one “central” set of pareto-optimization objectives, but the optimization is implemented in a decentralized way by “trading” until the opportunity costs of different subsystems equilibrate.
Yes, the market analogy seems like a valuable one to lean into. Textbooks tend to focus on a control systems approach to describing protein and cellular regulation and action. The body is viewed as an intricate machine, which is not designed, but has a design determined by evolutionary forces which acts to achieve functions conducive to reproduction. This tends to make me frame cells and proteins as components of a machine, which only gain an independent “agency” of their own in the case of cancer.
I can see two broad strategies for incorporating this into our understanding.
One is for communication and study purposes. By using familiar and vivid frames, we might be able to teach about biology in a more compelling manner.
This seems useful, but even better would be to use economic frames to derive truly novel insights. In my lab, control systems are the dominant framework for understanding the systems under study. It’s a large, old, world-class lab populated by scientists who are smarter and more experienced than me, so I find it likely that this tradition has resulted at least in part from its massive, sustained, demonstrated utility.
What sort of predictions or strategies can we make by using economic frames, beyond simply repackaging known mechanisms into novel language and analogies? How can economic frames lead us to concrete experimental techniques in order to test and build on these novel insights? What are the challenges and limitations of an economic framing of cellular biology?