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Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?

The operational logic of current biology is a very naive object-function correspondence picture. That is, “this component does that” and “this component speaks to that one”. This picture, when applied to a radio, can never produce an understanding of how radio works: the true circuit diagram of an electrical engineer does that.

The crucial point of the article is not that one should take the prescription that is in analogy to electrical engineering, which is to develop a formalized language that is predicated on the analogy between a living system and a electrical system, but that the fundamental operational logic may not have been grasped at all.

 

Follow ups:

This paper inspired another fun followup: "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?" [0] The authors investigated a 6502 running Atari games using popular neuroscience methods, finding things like transistors that are uniquely necessary to run Space Invaders, but, of course, never getting close to an actual understanding of how the processor functions. It really highlights how even with the huge amounts of data we are able to get from biological systems now, there's still a lot of information we paradigmatically can't understand. (See here)

Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor  DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268