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This is simply not true. If a cell would not behave as intended on average it would stop being a cell.

The fact is that an amoeba cell behaves in a certain way for all amoebas. It does not go around and behave like a stone or like a drop of olive oil or even like a cell of some random bacterium.

It has very clear and obvious functions and the mechanisms inside the cell are the reason it consistently shows amoeba behavior.

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If all you need for something to be a machine is "it has long-term stable behaviors and constituent parts that cause that behavior" then it seems like that sweeps in a lot of stuff that manifestly aren't machines, like tornadoes and similar. My gently cooling coffee is behaving like it does because of its constituent parts, but it's not a machine either.

parent was pointing out that cells don't just behave like an improbability drive, they do actually follow certain rules on average, in contrast to grand parent who asserted incorrectly that they don't. if they didn't, they wouldn't be a cell, they would be a soup.

That's kind of the thesis of the paper, that they're much more like highly organized soup than wiggly machines.

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