This is a very interesting article/video, and well-worth reading to get a sense of how complex proteins are, but I’m not convinced by the principle argument that proteins don’t constitue “machinery”.
The core philosophical question is actually interesting: what is a machine?
The author suggests a machine is anything with solid parts of that have a specific function, and goes on to argue that the metabolic machinery or cells doesn’t correspond to any of these three criteria. I’m not sure it matters whether the parts are solid, I don’t think multifunctionality disqualifies something from being a machine, and despite the limitations presented, I am not even convinced that it is senseless to decompose a cell into components. On this last point, it bears emphasizing that his criticism bears the analytical method in general, and is not specific to biology. There are edge cases in any decomposition of a whole into parts.
So while it’s interesting to see how these philosophical questions are at play in cellular biology, the case remains to be made that “machinery” is a fundamentally bad analogy. Here it also bears emphasizing that confusion between the subject of study and the metaphor is a risk with all metaphors (the map is not the territory), not especially this metaphor.
In sum, I wish the author had focused on the philosophical substance of “what even is a machine?”. That’s bound to be a richer investigation.
The core philosophical question is actually interesting: what is a machine?
The author suggests a machine is anything with solid parts of that have a specific function, and goes on to argue that the metabolic machinery or cells doesn’t correspond to any of these three criteria. I’m not sure it matters whether the parts are solid, I don’t think multifunctionality disqualifies something from being a machine, and despite the limitations presented, I am not even convinced that it is senseless to decompose a cell into components. On this last point, it bears emphasizing that his criticism bears the analytical method in general, and is not specific to biology. There are edge cases in any decomposition of a whole into parts.
So while it’s interesting to see how these philosophical questions are at play in cellular biology, the case remains to be made that “machinery” is a fundamentally bad analogy. Here it also bears emphasizing that confusion between the subject of study and the metaphor is a risk with all metaphors (the map is not the territory), not especially this metaphor.
In sum, I wish the author had focused on the philosophical substance of “what even is a machine?”. That’s bound to be a richer investigation.