A Systems Approach to Articular Cartilage

Abstract

A cell obeys all known physical and chemical laws. But the way cells ‘evolved through natural selection’ means that cellular systems have come to function in ways that are more complex, and often surprisingly so, than our more familiar ‘engineering systems’ (see discussion and explanation in Appendix B how this came to pass). The structure of engineering systems tends to reflect the way they were conceived in a human mind, while cellular systems have been created using a ‘trial and error’ approach ever-changing environments. Evolutionary processes have (and are) been constantly testing new things. So just about any and every potentially useful connection between any two systems you care to name, across the full range of length scales from molecules to cells to organisms and groups, has been explored by evolutionary processes a bewildering number of times over the course of life on earth.