A friend passes on this paragraph from the Introduction to Chapter 6 of Introduction to Biosemiotics:
Life depends on the fine tuned co-ordination of an astronomical number of biochemical reactions taking place inside and across different kinds of membranous structures …
The emergence of this pattern of subtle scaffolding devices through evolution is, of course, in a certain sense the outcome of natural selection. But it should also be noticed that an important aspect of this process is the capacity – or talent one might say – of individual cells and cell assemblies to change their internal settings in integrated waves (e. g. signal transduction cascades) under the influence of external (or new) molecular cues. The semiotic logic of localized dynamic biochemistry in a given embryonic tissue thus would tend to tell us as much or more about the actual “causality” behind semiotic emergence than do explanations in terms of “natural selection” alone.”
Hmm. Either cells are much smarter than we think or some sort of fine-tuning underlies biology.