Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Friday, August 01, 2014, 17:45 (3553 days ago) @ David Turell

I have quoted Shapiro in support of the contention that cells are sentient, intelligent beings, and their intelligence may play a key role in the evolutionary process.-DAVID: Your quotes are correct, and I could give you others that would further reinforce your proposed inerpretation of Shapiro. -Thank you. There are two areas of discussion here: 1) whether the cell is or is not intelligent; 2) how big a role might its intelligence have played in evolution.

DAVID: First point. He is proselytizing his point of view so his writing is very forceful. Secondly I believe he is correct. But what I can't get you to undertstand is 1) note that it is all "information based"; 2) the sensory systems and self-modification fuctions are serial biochemical reactions under tight feed back controls (a causes b, which causes c, which makes d, which modifies a to stop at a certain point).-His key word is “cognitive”, repeated over and over again, and by stressing “biochemical reactions” you are glossing over the list of attributes in quote 3: “sentience, subjectivity, cognition, communication, and intelligence” - to which we must add decision-making. All cognitive processes, including our own, are information based and accompanied by biochemical reactions involving cause and effect. The forcefulness of his writing is irrelevant if you believe he is correct. May I therefore take it that you now agree that the cell is sentient, subjective, cognitive, communicative and intelligent? (If not, what exactly do you agree with him about?)
 
DAVID: [...] It is a giant leap to conclude that this explains or even points a way to explaining punctuated equilibrium. All it does is offer the possibility that somehow epigentics causes speciation. It only results in small changes. But it in no way explains the huge jumps, which is what the fossil record gives us. [...] Your theory is based on his work, but if you asked him, I'll bet he would tell you he has no way of knowing if you are even close to a solution to the question.-Not having read the book, I have no idea how far he takes the idea that “novelty in evolution is inherently linked to the active and cognitive lifestyle of organisms”, but that need not stop us from pursuing this idea to its possible logical conclusions. Evolution can only progress through innovation, and since all life is composed of cells and cellular communities, it stands to reason that all successful innovations have to entail cooperation between the cell communities. If we accept that the huge jumps in the fossil record are due to sudden changes and not to gaps in the record, it also stands to reason that this cooperation actually took place. An objection seems to be that the time scale is not large enough to allow for all the complexities involved in the formation of new organs. But we have no criteria by which to judge the time scale needed for intelligent, sentient, cooperative beings to create a functioning organ. Even if we accept the conservative estimate of 10 million years for the major changes in the Cambrian, we are talking of hundreds of thousands of generations of organisms. We don't know the precise conditions, and above all we don't know the nature or scope of the intelligence, but we see the results. And so instead of arguing that neither automata nor random mutations could have produced such complexities, we can now argue - far more convincingly if Margulis, Shapiro, Albrecht-Buehler & Co are correct - that intelligent beings, working in collaboration with one another, could and did do it in the time shown by the fossil record.
 
It might be pertinent to ask why innovation as such appears to have stopped now. The potential for change has to be there still (as we know from continued adaptation), but for the time being, perhaps the cells have no incentive to invent, or have reached their inventive capacity given current conditions. Perhaps it requires dramatic environmental changes to bring forth dramatic new developments. That is why you focus all the time on apparently automatic activities - the innovations have already taken place, and what we see is the outcome and never the process that led to the outcome.
 
To sum up: Shapiro says cells are intelligent, but you do not believe that cells can be intelligent enough to create new organs. The organs are there, and the cells must have cooperated to produce them, or they would not have worked. You do not have an alternative explanation, since you accept that evolution happened and you do not believe in your God preprogramming or intervening to create every single innovation. Once you accept Shapiro's basic thesis, punctuated equilibrium ceases to be an insoluble problem. New organs might conceivably be the result of intelligent design by the cells themselves. And maybe the intelligence of cells themselves is the result of intelligent design by your God.