See the book "The Machinery of Life", by David S Goodsell, the artist of the first illustration. It's an entire book of such illustrations, ordered to walk the reader though the different processes happening in a cell. I'm not a biologist, but I bought this book several years ago as it was just so fascinating and appealed to my engineering mind set of wanting to know how a system hangs together.
It makes sense in my mind that a noisy system will be, on average, operating at something approaching optimality. The noise jogs the system out of local minima and is effectively a form of annealing (in the numerical sense).
Off-topic, but thank for introducing me to the phrase “how a system hangs together” - it so neatly encapsulates the idea of the interactions between supporting elements of a system and the forces acting upon them.
Yes, my analogy is a blind man in a room with 1000 locked doors, and he has a key that fits only one of the locks and somehow, quickly, finds that door, uses his key, and opens it.
It makes sense in my mind that a noisy system will be, on average, operating at something approaching optimality. The noise jogs the system out of local minima and is effectively a form of annealing (in the numerical sense).