Instead of assigning too high-level meaning to stuff that works on a much lower level, it might be the opposite. The reason why you can say that one transistor

Instead of assigning too high-level meaning to stuff that works on a much lower level, it might be the opposite. The reason why you can say that one transistor doesn't handle moving up and down is because we can engineer and economically produce systems with enough spare resources and performance to implement general computing devices capable of running arbitrary programs. If instead you were playing say... a very early arcade game, you might very well actually have the 'X coord' register implemented in a fixed discrete component. One of the assumptions baked into biology is that by the time you're talking about cells, you're talking about implementations of behavior subject to reasonably strict constraints (plus hilarious amounts of path dependent evolution), with the assumption that things are more like old school analog/digital electronics where every component counts, versus modern integrated processors. That's not to say that they have the perfect analytical techniques for solving problems in their domain space, or any domain space.