4 ms·
That analogy may be more insightful than you meant it to be. Animal cells (e.g., the ones in your body or mine) do not have cell walls. They do have membranes
by gjm11 4y ago
That analogy may be more insightful than you meant it to be.
Animal cells (e.g., the ones in your body or mine) do not have cell walls. They do have membranes surrounding the cells, but they aren't walls.
In the same way, any country has borders, but there's a lot of scope for variation in what they allow across the border under what conditions. "Open borders" does not mean "no borders".
For instance, the borders between countries in the Schengen Area of Europe are "open", even though those countries still have borders. This has been the case since 1995. Civilization there does not appear to have fallen so far.
- galangalalgol 4y agoTo get into the Schengen area there is a bit more inspection though right? We are just talking about a bigger cell.
- gjm11 4y agoWe're talking about a multicellular organism. An animal's skin keeps out things that its individual cell membranes aren't concerned with. (I don't actually think the details of what cell walls, cell membranes, skin, etc., do and don't regulate / completely block really tell us anything much about what should happen at national borders. If tomorrow someone discovered a previously unknown regulatory mechanism in cell membranes, that shouldn't make anyone change their mind about immigration controls. The way these analogies actually work is that someone decides what they think about immigration on other grounds, and then goes looking for an analogy that fits the rhetorical point they want to make. Someone arguing for "open borders" would probably choose something else rather than cells to make analogies with. The analogy isn't doing any real intellectual work, it's just window-dressing.)
- koheripbal 4y agoYou've made a useless semantic argument between using the word "wall" vs "membrane". A membrane or wall regulate the input/output of everything in/out of the cell - from water to proteins to everything else. A cell without a membrane dies - immediately.
- gjm11 4y agoNo, I've made a substantive observation about the point actually at issue: you implied that every country necessarily has immigration controls at its border, which in fact is not true. You had tried to support that claim by making an analogy with biological cells, and it pleased me that in fact my counter-point fits into that analogy, but it doesn't really matter: if it turns out that the cell-analogue of "every country has to have immigration controls at its border" is true, all that means is that cells were a bad analogy because, again, it is simply not true that every country needs immigration controls at its border. I am not a cell biologist so this might be wrong, but my understanding is that cell membranes are in fact permeable to water and don't have any particular ability to regulate the movement of water in and out of the cell. The rate at which that happens will be affected by e.g. concentration of solutes on each side, but it's not a thing a typical cell has mechanisms for controlling. I think there are such mechanisms in some cells in the kidney, but AIUI while most (all?) cells have aquaporins there's nothing adjusting their permeability. But, once again, while this is all interesting in its own right it tells us nothing about what countries can, or do, or should regulate. If some researcher makes a stunning discovery that overturns our understanding of what cell membranes do, the appropriate adjustment in national-border regulation will be zero.