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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

If things happened out of order, the cell wouldn't work at all. There are a lot of different signal pathways that ensure timing is correct. You can take a look at even the most basic functionalities like DNA replication, or energy exchange. And the cell is not timed only in regards to itself, but based on the system it lives in, too - and that system is timed too, repeat x1000000.

Humans (and other living beings) can work with such low amount of waste heat and intake energy only thanks to atomically precise clocking.

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Perhaps the above commenter is talking about the perceived scale or speed of time? Order of events certainly seems to matter.

At the same time, order of events is also a certain way of modelling something. There may be alternative models which can be meaningful without the order of time. But most (probably all) models are designed with the way we perceive time in mind.

DNA replication is a structural pattern matching and has nothing to do with time.

Moreover, it is so stable exactly because it has neither the notion of time nor counting.

Maybe watch a video about the process on Youtube? What you're saying is correct in a very abstract sense, but does not really convey what is actually happening inside the cell. Timing is extremely important because if the proteins worked out of order (which is often different based on signals), wrong DNA would come out. Also, other systems inside and outside the cell have influence on the replication (you don't always replicate the whole DNA, sometimes it's necessary to not finish the whole process and do something else as the last step, etc). And replication is not stable at all, btw, but there is very good error handling. And don't get me started on DNA activation.

Cells literally have a clock pathway.

> Maybe watch a video about the process on Youtube?

Any recommendations?

I like this one: https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY

This one is about 'garbage collection' of cells: https://youtu.be/DR80Huxp4y8

That’s awesome. I learned more about DNA in 5 mins than all my biology classes.

One more time. DNA replication relies only on particular structures and enzimes to transform these. There is no notion of time whatsoever. Only availability of structural elements, and concentration. Everything is decoupled and feedback loops based.

And sequences of actions are maintained by pipelining of physical molecular structures - each enzime recognizes it's own unique patterns. That is it.

In old times this was called principle-guided science.

Understanding of principles spares one from knowing all the details.

The problem here is that what everyone recognizes as clocks, you don't. The scientific consensus is elsewhere though. There is no reason to call a clocking pathway anything else if its purpose is to determine after how much time should something happen.

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