Matter Over Mind

My Vertebrate Physiology professor liked to say that muscle is incredibly stupid tissue. I can certainly see where he's coming from. Throw enough action potentials at muscle tissue and it will build up enough enough of a calcium ion concentration to finally contract. It doesn't really do much else. I'd have to disagree that muscle is stupid, though. The contraction of a muscle fiber (or, more accurately for our purposes, the movement of motor proteins along filaments of a cell) is one of the more elegant solutions to a basic evolutionary problem.

Before I go on, I feel I should clarify something. It should be clear by now that I believe evolution to be a very real process. I've seen too much evidence supporting the theory to think otherwise, but I'm open to discuss other viewpoints in a civilized manner. A discussion of the matter is one of my planned posts, but I'm hoping I'll soon hear the results of the Texas Congress decision on the issue of textbooks teaching various theories of speciation.

At any rate, we return to the evolutionary problem. Even single celled organisms require the ability to move things within themselves. Food usually doesn't fall into your lap. Therefore, some mechanism of movement is required. But how can a cell properly build a network for movement without it being overly complex? The answer is to built it out of subunits. This is a nice theme in biology. Making something large out of one unit is incredibly complex and inefficient. Thus, muscles are made of muscle fibers. Muscle fibers have filaments that contract. Even those filaments are made of subunits individually created by a cell.

What bugs me about the whole filament thing is this: every cell that I know about has them for transporting proteins around the cell to the proper location. How, though, did cells survive without such a network to begin with and then evolve it later? That's how evolution works, after all. Surely the first cells didn't have such a thing. I'll have to do some research on the matter because I'm sure someone has looked into it before. There are three types of filaments I know of that cells use, two of which are used for movement within the cell of of the cell. Certainly each type of filament evolved independently. Perhaps, though, such an issue is an example of one of the problems with the study of evolutionary biology, in that we still can't explain everything. Perhaps therein lies the divine.