Cell Units of life Meditation on purpose Commentary

Robert Hooke, Antonie van Leeuwenhock, Robert Brown cell biology

Cell

• Robert Hooke discovered cork cells
• in 1665 and named them
• after the small rooms in a monastery.
• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek described
• the blood cells of salmon in 1719
• and called their nuclei lumen.
• Robert Brown described orchid cells
• in 1831 and observed an opaque area
• that he called the areola or nucleus.

Units of life

• The cell is the common
• smallest unit of life
• of all known living things.
• Some plants and creatures
• have only one cell;
• humans have trillions.
• Cells are complex.
• Cells in a body are specialized
• to perform complementary roles.
• Each cell in a colony
• of a single-celled organism
• behaves exactly the same
• but different single-celled organisms
• are specialized to perform
• complementary roles in their ecosystem.
• Therefore, the purpose of a cell,
• other than its own perpetuation,
• is to support the system of which it is a part.

Meditation on purpose

• What came first—the organism or its purpose?
• If these were synchronic, then it would be possible
• anything that appears spontaneously has its own purpose,
• which is not to say that anything we create justifies itself.
• What would it mean if we were to say
• that a new organism could appear without a purpose?
• That it could appear but not survive?
• That it must soon develop a purpose?
• Possibly purpose is only our rationalization for its function,
• good or bad, in the system of which it is a part.