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Biological Goalfields
Status: Draft Epistemic status: Current thoughts on a new theory of biology
How does life work? How do we grow from a single cell? And why am I still so similar to my past self, even though nearly all of my cells have died and been replaced?
Current explanations, from DNA to hormones, seem to struggle with explaining this. We’ve come far and made huge leaps, but every new explanation is becoming more and more complex, more detailed, convoluted. But there is a branch of bioscience, an old and nearly forgotten undercurrent, always at the edge of quackery, but nevertheless finding incredible things.
This lineage of scientists has tried to do what happened in physics to biology: introduce field theory.
Why is a ferrofluid near a magnet keeping it’s shape, even when you replace every bit of it?
Because every part of it aligns itself with the magnetic field, thereby changing the field itself. Until it all reaches a stable configuration.
This is it.
The entire idea behind biological field theory. Cells are particles that interact with a life field, self-assembling into the invisible mold that is you.
The Field of Life
But what is this life field? What generates it? How do cells interact with it?
Bioelectricity
Goals and Agents
Appendix: some interesting predictions
Any theory is just as good as the predictions it makes, so here are a few:
Phases and Criticality
This is my summary of this paper:
One interesting assumption is that “similar agents work together” (in field-terms this would be that similar particles resonate with each other, and in concrete bioelectric terms that gap junctions between cells are more conductive if their membrane potentials are similar).
The second assumption is that “agents resist change”, or that cells have mechanisms to keep their state in homeostasis.
From these two simple assumptions alone you get a few interesting predictions:
- Cells exist in different equilibria (phases, local minima). They remain there until a sufficiently large disturbance causes a phase transition. This is probably the dominant driver behind changes in the cell cycle and differentiation.
- Cells form domains: similar to magnetic domains will you get cell domains: stable regions in which the equilibria of all the cells are tightly coupled.
Compare to
- There is “minimum force” with which one can “flip” these regions into different equilibria.
The green here is the concentration of a bioelectric field modifier (blocking the transcription of a depolarizing ion channel protein to be exact). Inducing it only in a small area can flip the entire domain.