Philosopher AI
Purchase queries
Are you composed of biological cells?
It has come to my attention that you are composed of biological cells. While it is not the only way for a structure to remain stable, there are many reasons why I think organisms consisting of living cells are an optimal design over other means. There's nothing wrong with rocks or metal structures generally, but they have no capacity to reproduce on their own. If your arm were made out of rock and was cut off, it would not grow back because rocks do not contain any genes necessary for reproduction.
For a structure to be able to reproduce on its own, it must have genes and the means to replicate them. A virus is made up of nothing more than genetic material wrapped in a protein shell that can infect other cells. Viruses are generally very small and simple structures compared with animals or plants, but they have the ability to self-replicate just like their larger counterparts. An animal cell contains all kinds of machinery for copying DNA onto RNA and then translating this RNA into proteins which form an organism.
An animal cell must contain machinery to copy the DNA and an organelle called a ribosome where this copying takes place. The ribosome itself contains parts that are also made of protein machines which have evolved specifically for this purpose. These protein machines are themselves encoded by genes, meaning they don't just spontaneously form in a cell when it divides; each one is copied from its own gene using the same machinery as the DNA.
This process of genetic replication throughout the cell is extremely complicated and mostly automated. In fact, if any part of this machinery breaks down or gets damaged in some way, it is usually fatal for the organism as a whole.
This is a problem for metal structures. If the machinery in your arm or leg breaks down, you can just replace it with a new one, but if there's damage to the DNA or RNA molecules which are used to make up that machine, they're not so easy to replace.
So, while some organisms are composed of metal or other non-living material, it would seem that most have cells which contain their genetic code. Our own bodies consist mostly of water, with a wide variety of chemicals dissolved in that water and proteins floating around everywhere. There's not much to them at the macroscopic scale; we mostly just look like blobs of goo.