Insightful people have noted that the brain has been difficult to understand from simple measurements because of its relative irreducibility to single neuron dynamics, suspected to be a result of emergent properties. Line up a few hundred million transistors very carefully and you get a fast but 'stupid' processor; bag a bunch of proteins with a lipid membrane and you're still far from a functioning cell; the list goes on. Something about the whole, goes the cliche, is greater than the sum of its parts. I've traditionally only heard about this concept as it applies to neuroscience, but I recently came across a great quote from D'Arcy Thompson that could use some fresh air on the Internet. In terms of cell biology, he warns against thinking of a multicellular organism in terms of its constituent cells, arguing instead that the biophysics is better understood in terms of the whole tissue and the interactions between its pieces. I'm not sure whether or not this was added in the revised edition of On Growth and Form (1942), but I'd like to think that this was written in the first edition, published in 1917:
But if the cell acts, after this fashion, as a whole, each part interacting of necessity with the rest, the same is certainly true of the entire multicellular organism: as Schwann said of old, in very precise and adequate words, “the whole organism subsists only by means of the reciprocal action of the single elementary parts.” As Wilson says again, “the physiological autonomy of the individual cell falls into the background… and the apparently composite character which the multicellular organism may exhibit is owing to a secondary distribution of its energies among local centres of action.” It is here that the homology breaks down which is so often drawn, and overdrawn, between the unicellular organism and the individual cell of the metazoon.
Whitman, Adam Sedgwick, and others have lost no opportunity of warning us against a too literal acceptation of the cell-theory, against the view that the multicellular organism is a colony (or as Haeckel called it, in the case of the plant, a “republic”) of independent units of life… Hofmeister and Sachs have taught us that in the plant the growth of the mass, the growth of the organ, is the primary fact, that “cell formation is a phenomenon very general in organic life, but still only of secondary significance.” “Comparative embryology,” says Whitman, “reminds us at every turn that the organism dominates cell-formation, using for the same purpose one, several, or many cells, massing its material and directing its movements and shaping its organs, as if cells did not exist.”…
…Discussed almost wholly from the concrete, or morphological point of view, the question has for the most part been made to turn on whether actual protoplasmic continuity can be demonstrated between one cell and another, whether the organism be an actual reticulum, or syncytium. But from the dynamical point of view the question is much simpler. We then deal not with material continuity, not with little bridges of connecting protoplasm, but with a continuity of forces, a comprehensive field of force, which runs through and through the entire organism and is by no means restricted in its passage to a protoplasmic continuum… As Whitman says, “the fact that physiological unity is not broken by cell-boundaries is confirmed in so many ways that it must be accepted as one of the fundamental truths of biology.”
—D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form: The Complete Revised Edition, pp. 343–345
The last paragraph is especially appropriate in light of a recent publication that gives evidence for a possible interaction between cortical network activity and its global, “endogenous electric field.”
