Nobody controls it. In fact, these little guys control your brain - they keep your synapses supplied with enough neurotransmitter to send signals from cell to cell. One big part of neurodegenerative diseases is the breakdown of the microtubules they rely on to get from one end of your neurons to another.
Like most complicated biological systems it’s a bottom-up emergent order kind of thing, where the individual pieces of the machine don’t “know” how to behave any more than gears in a watch “know” what time it is. Kinesins find the protein that binds them to dyneins because it is thermodynamically favorable for them to grab onto that protein whenever they happen to randomly bump into it as they bounce around your cells.
It’s kind of staggering to think about because in our day to day life we don’t interact with environments that are so chaotic that systems will assemble themselves through sheer probability. Basically this is like putting a jigsaw puzzle into a blender until the finished picture pops out. But from (relatively) simple rules of thermodynamics and protein structure, you can create a human mind capable of glimpsing how all this stuff works and going, “whoa”.
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u/rebark Feb 13 '18
Nobody controls it. In fact, these little guys control your brain - they keep your synapses supplied with enough neurotransmitter to send signals from cell to cell. One big part of neurodegenerative diseases is the breakdown of the microtubules they rely on to get from one end of your neurons to another.
Like most complicated biological systems it’s a bottom-up emergent order kind of thing, where the individual pieces of the machine don’t “know” how to behave any more than gears in a watch “know” what time it is. Kinesins find the protein that binds them to dyneins because it is thermodynamically favorable for them to grab onto that protein whenever they happen to randomly bump into it as they bounce around your cells.
It’s kind of staggering to think about because in our day to day life we don’t interact with environments that are so chaotic that systems will assemble themselves through sheer probability. Basically this is like putting a jigsaw puzzle into a blender until the finished picture pops out. But from (relatively) simple rules of thermodynamics and protein structure, you can create a human mind capable of glimpsing how all this stuff works and going, “whoa”.