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?
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?