Posted by defrost 5 hours ago
Out of curiosity, do you use Claude a lot and did you pick up the saying from it?
Are you Claude?
Or just a coincidence?
I suppose I can see why. But at the time I was just curious about the idea of "mule" cells.
"The idea of a cell that didn't reproduce at all occurred to me. Maybe created by a factory cell. It would be used to change an environment or produce some useful compound. I can imagine manufacturing them to process chemicals, or create mechanical structures. Put a network address in each one and they can be coordinated. The advantage of not reproducing is that they couldn't mutate if they had no reproduction mechanism at all. Can only come from the factory. Of course they could still be susceptible to viruses."
I've done a little googling since, and mule cells are actually a thing. In organisms they are very common. Neurons are an example. Parts of the immune system. There's also a thing in bacteria where cells divide, creating two daughter cells, one that can reproduce and one that can't. The one that can't makes a support structure around the one that can and then dies. This is how sporulation works.
None of this is deep, dark secret stuff. Some clumsy Wikipedia research got me this deep. If that's dangerous we are in deep sh*t.
(I'm not a biologist, I'm an animator who makes visualizations for university courses.)
Also, go MN!
Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.
We have always theorized the start of life but this could actively show that life could have started on a rock floating in space given enough time. No sky daddy and no aliens necessary!