Is the body a bureaucracy or an economy?
Some time in that past few years, I got to hear Dr. Douglas C. Wallace, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences and Molecular Medicine at UCI discuss his research on mitochondria, the energy organelles that power all our cells. Wallace is the generally acknowledged top-gun worldwide in mitochondrial research. I posed him a hypothesis, during Q & A, which I had come up with on my own to explain an interesting anomoly.
Background: We all have various different variants of mitochondrial DNA within us, scattered semi-randomly in our various tissues and organs. The mitochondria has its own DNA, BTW, independent of the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. And, each cell has many, many mitochondria to power it, each with its own DNA history. Almost all of it comes from the mother's side - the egg. Occasionally some sperm mitochondrial DNA may sneak in, but not much or often. Thus, it is possible to independently confirm genetic drifts in populations using the mitochondrial DNA for the female side and Y-chromosomes for the male, and some of Dr. Wallace's research has been in the field of tracing population movements in humans through prehistory, by genetic analysis.
The anomaly comes in the following form: It turns out that the good mitochondria tend to come to be replaced by successively inferior breeds as we age. Not all mitochondria are equal. Some are totally useless and parasitical, merely eating to reproduce and contributing nothing to the cell's energy budget. Others are Schwartzeneggar Mitochondria - real powerhouses. Mutations occur and get passed along. If there are too many of the bad kind, the cell becomes non-functional or dies. When the egg divides to form an embryo which divides again and again to form the foetus, which becomes the child from more divisions, which becomes the adult, etc., each new division is another cast of the dice of mitochondrial inheritance.
So, identical twins are not. One may have inherited all bad mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) in a particular organ or tissue - say the heart...
So the interesting question is WHY the weak, bad mDNA ends up dominating with aging. AND, I had a solution. I hypothesized that the good mDNA wore the cells out, as they did a disproportionate amount of the work, while the weaker, slower mDNA lasted longer, so that we had lots of energy in youth, to make up for stupidity, right? Then the slower, perhaps less free-radical generating mDNA dominated through adulthood, until the really weak mDNA was all that was left, in old age.
Sounds plausible? Explains the facts? Makes sense? Yes, yes and yes - and Dr. Wallace complimented me on this. However, it has the fatal flaw of being WRONG!!!
Ok, what actually happens - although it makes little sense - is that the cells with weak mDNA, lacking energy, get the signal or decide themselves to solve the problem by dividing, which may offer a temporary solution, admittedly, but seems to only exacerbate problems long term. The strong, efficient, energetic cells never see any need to divide.
Well, things stood at that point in my thinking for some time. It just didn't compute. WHY would evolution have selected for this kind of behavior?
So, one night I was thinging about fellow anarchist Jarret Wollstein's superlative analysis of the problem of the squeeky wheel. When does the police department get more funding - when crime goes up or when crime goes down? Here we have an unfortunate principle of bureaucracy in all forms. The least successful departments get the budget increases. So, failure on every level is rewarded, and, being rewarded, tends to replicate and be emulated. State's tend to get more and more inefficient as a consequence, until they destroy the societies that finance them. In the market, a company may go through the same devolution, but it usually has better tools of internal analysis, as its motivation is profit. Also, only that one business tends to fail, while the state drags everything down with it.
So, my breakthrough was when I realized I could apply this to the human body. Voila! A NEW theory of aging. Consider the body as a political state, with all kinds of internal feedback loops to try to prevent runaway positive feedback, etc., but still, fundamentally a top-down hierarchy. Systemic flaws creep in because the internal information structure is never perfect. The model cannot model itself at some point, and then the body starts rewarding failure. Then we get overweight, diabetes, other auto-immune problems (which may or may not fall under this paradigm), and a host of yet unidentified system flaws that lead us further and further away from real balance and require more and more energy expenditure to correct or compensate for.
We've seen this kind of counter-intuitive system failure before in the body, as in the case of damaged heart tissue. Instead of simply repairing the damage from a minor infarction, the damaged area tends to spread over time until the entire heart fails. This is a failure in programming on the part of the body's system control, and it tends to lend support to the idea that large portions of physiological functions behave more like a rigid bureaucracy than a self-correcting market.
While a lot of bad feedback loops may bring up specific remedies - like the state requiring that schools meet certain academic goals or lose funding - there are many others that are missed in the evolutionary selection process, and eventually the body system falls more and more into the territory of rewarding failure, which perpetuates itself until the entire system collapses. Perhaps only when we do some real system intervention - essentially bringing intelligent oversight to the system - will we be able to fully countervene this systemic flaw.
Now will somebody please knock this argument down for me?