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It does seem like playing with words a little bit, by taking extreme definitions in both directions, from highly regulated machine, to random lump of gooo. By

It does seem like playing with words a little bit, by taking extreme definitions in both directions, from highly regulated machine, to random lump of gooo. By taking the extreme definitions, he's been able to eliminate any of the common ground, to make a cell not a machine. But just looking at mitochondria as an example, and ATP transport. That looks very repeatable, machine like. It isn't like mitochondria just suddenly change function, or form out of random goo and change shape and function, they are pretty much transporting ATP. That is what they do. It is highly regular and repeatable and built from a blue print. The self regulating goo is nice idea, I think using it to say we aren't machines is the stretch.

roywiggins 2y ago
The footnote on page 122 leaves room for some parts of the cell to be amenable to mechanistic explanations, but that since large parts of the cell aren't, it's insufficient to explain what's going on overall: > this conclusion does not imply that every entity or process within the cell is being (or needs to be) reconceptualized. To be clear, the thesis I have sought to defend is not that all organelles exist as irreversible steady states, that every protein complex is a pleomorphic ensemble, and so on. It is rather that a very large number of cellular and molecular phenomena that were traditionally interpreted in terms that support the MCC are now being explained in terms that directly oppose it.