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by whymauri 1785 days ago
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There was a time when I worked in the intersection of peripheral neuroscience and the immune system, studying the immune response of mammals to optogenetic therapies. It was a widely held belief that, in that problem space, the complexity of the immune system outpaced ambiguities and unknowns we had surrounding the PNS.

Basically, what I'm saying is take every statement you've seen in the media and documentaries about how complex the nervous system is, and consider that the immune system is considered equally incomprehensible today.

Not only is the immune system spaghetti code, but it likes to break all the time and, to our perspective, is full of weird and undefined behaviors.

2 comments

Well, if my bio 200 class taught me anything, it's that we don't have bodies that are created with cells all united to single goals or purposes.

Our bodies are microservice hell :D. We have a bunch of cells all performing their complicated jobs and duties working together in a crazy complex distributed system. Even the internals of the cells are a bunch of horribly stitched together glue code that just happens to work because of billions of years of pruning off the glue that doesn't work.

It's an incredibly complex chain of chemical reactions which has been selected of eons based on which chains of chemical reactions produce more of the same chains. It's madness.

Maybe one way to think about biology is: "An ongoing exercise in systems documentation." :P
Evolution is a billion years of kludges.
No refactoring whatsoever…