Baseball lovers will appreciate this glimpse into what your senses and nerves have to do to bat a homer. A news item from Oregon State:

Researchers have discovered a mechanism of intercellular communication that helps explain how biological systems and actions — ranging from a beating heart to the ability to hit a home run — function properly most of the time, and in some scenarios quite remarkably. [Emphasis added.]

It’s a noisy world out there. The batter can’t focus on irrelevant sounds from the stands. The information coming in through his senses has to be sorted and organized quickly. Simple but accurate representations must be served to the brain. Then, the brain’s decision has to signal responses in the muscles, nerves and heart. All this must happen very quickly. Each cell is a player on a vast field:

In this process, a chemical stimulus called ATP functions as a signaling molecule, which, in turn, causes calcium levels in a cell to rise and decline, and tells a cell it’s time to do its job — whether that be sending a nerve impulse, seeing a bird in flight or repairing a wound. These sensing processes are fundamental to the function of life.

So how does the body pull all this together? There are trillions of cells involved, all signaling each other. The resulting “interactive chatter” among them would be overwhelming, but the body takes advantage of collective wisdom. Physicist Bo Sun at OSU explains:

“The thing is, individual cells don’t always get the message right, their sensory process can be noisy, confusing, and they make mistakes,” Sun said. “But there’s strength in numbers, and the collective sensory ability of many cells working together usually comes up with the right answer. This collective communication is essential to life.”

Cells have a way of voting a consensus:

This interactive chatter continues, and a preponderance of cells receiving one sensation persuade a lesser number of cells reporting a different sensation that they must be wrong. By working in communication and collaboration, most of the cells eventually decide what the correct sensory input is, and the signal that gets passed along is pretty accurate.

Now let’s put it together in a real-life situation requiring rapid response. Watch a baseball play from the cells’ perspective, as the batter sees a 93-mile-per-hour fastball coming in low:

The photoreceptor cells in the batter’s eyes see the pitch coming. Some cells see it as a curve in the dirt, and some mistake it for a changeup, a slower pitch. But the majority of the cells come to the correct conclusion, it’s a fastball at the knees, and they spread the word. After extensive communication between all these cells, a conclusion is reached and the correct message is sent to neurons in the brain.

Think how fast this has to happen. That’s a pretty rapid committee meeting! The conclusion is barely out the eyeballs, and the fastball keeps coming at 93 mph.

The brain cells, in turn, send a strong signal through nerves to muscles all over the batter’s body, the shoulders, legs, and especially arms. The signals arrive and once again a collaborative process takes place, deciding what the message is and how to react. Calcium ions in muscle cells are triggered and a brutally fast-but-accurate response is triggered, swinging the bat. This entire process, from the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand to contact with the bat, takes less than half a second.

Nobody bats a thousand, we know. The real wonder is that the batter connects at all.

On a perfect day — the cellular debate over what pitch was coming was sufficiently short-lived, the timing exact, the muscle contractions just right — the ball explodes off the bat and sails over the center field fence.

On a more realistic day — since the best hitters in the world only succeed 3 times out of 10 — the ball bounces weakly to the second baseman for an easy out. This in turn triggers the collective groans of 30,000 disappointed fans. But the heart has cellular communication that continues to guarantee its normal beating, and the player lives to bat another day.

Behind this colorful description is a scientific paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the chemical details of cellular signaling, without the baseball references. The paper is notable for its mention of “design principles” and utter lack of Darwinian vocabulary like natural selection, phylogeny, or evolution. Enjoy this refreshing outlook, loaded with design concepts:

Decoding the cellular response to environmental perturbations, such as chemosensing, photosensing, and mechanosensing, has been of central importance in our understanding of living systems. To date, most studies of cellular sensation and response have focused on single isolated cells or population averages. An emerging picture from these studies is the set of design principles governing cellular signaling pathways: these pathways are organized into an intertwined, often redundant network with architecture that is closely related to the robustness of cellular information processing.

The Oregon State researchers had a hunch that a higher level of information processing is going on:

However, many examples suggest that collective sensing by many interacting cells may provide another dimension for the cells to process environmental cues. Examples, such as quorum sensing in bacterial colonies, olfaction in insects and mammals, glucose response in the pancreatic islet, and the visual processing of retinal ganglion cells, suggest a fundamental need to revisit cellular information processing in the context of multicellular sensation and response, because even weak cell-to-cell interaction may have strong impact on the states of multicellular network dynamics. In particular, we seek to examine how the sensory response of cells in a population differs from that of isolated cells and whether we can tune between these two extremes by controlling the degree of cell-cell communication.

They’ve set up an intriguing question. How does the inside of a body respond to cues from the outside? What translates sensations into chemical signals? How are those signals communicated inside cells and between cells? The OSU team describes their approach:

We study a population of fibroblast cells that responds to a chemical stimulus (ATP) and communicates by molecule exchange. Combining experiments and mathematical modeling, we find that cells exhibit calcium oscillations in response to not only the ATP stimulus but also, increased cell-cell communication. Our results show that, when cells are together, their sensory responses reflect not just the stimulus level but also, the degree of communication within the population.

And thus, with exemplary scientific techniques, they shed light on a phenomenon of great interest to us all. OSU’s Dr. Sun explains why this is “remarkable”:

“These processes of collective sensory communication are usually accurate, but sometimes work better than others. Mistakes are made,” Sun said. “Even so, this process makes life possible. And when everything goes just right, the results can be remarkable.“

We don’t know if these folks at OSU will appreciate the applause, but ask any researcher anywhere: Would a Darwinian spin have added anything to this paper? Baseball games are familiar to us all, and each time a batter swings, these phenomena — cell signaling, quorum sensing, and information processing — really happen. The evidence for “design principles” is pretty clear every time the batter connects with the ball. Learning about how that happens makes for good scientific work; it is sufficient without a narrative gloss about how it might have “evolved.”

Show us the phenomenon, describe how it works, and advance our understanding with sound laboratory practices. If the phenomenon exhibits good design principles, it’s OK to say so. If all scientists followed OSU’s example in this paper, and if science reporters wrote like the author of the news items cited above, then the science-consuming public would be well served.

Photo: Babe Ruth, 1916, by Charles M. Conlon (Mears Auctions) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.