The Intelligent Cell; transport within (Origins)

by dhw, Thursday, January 05, 2012, 14:27 (4487 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: There are proteins (kinesins) in each cell that carry materials along microtubules. When they have nothing to carry, they stop and rest.

http://the-scientist.com/2012/01/01/motor-lock/

This article and the one about parasites under Natures Wonders, on which you comment that “these guys are so clever”, once again show “intelligence” within the cell itself as well as within creatures which have devised an immensely complex technique of survival. One must always bear in mind that at some time each of these techniques was new, and so some form of intelligence must have experimented with it before it got passed on.

The latest Workshop from the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies contains two brief reports from New Scientist which I find extremely revealing in this context. “Sulphur eating bacteria that live in sediments on the sea floor appear to be connected by ‘a network of microbial nanowires’. Electric current flowing along these protein filaments allows ‘communities of bacteria to act as one super-organism’. The process has been called ‘electrical symbiosis’.” This ties in with Lynn Margulis’s ‘symbiotic life forms’. Each of us is also a super-organism, and we contain a wide variety of ‘intelligent’ communities that are interconnected.

Along with this argument, I’m still intrigued by the idea of the intelligent cell (or community of cells) responding to outside conditions and working out ways to survive. Applying this idea, rather than that of random mutations, to the evolution of new organs, organisms, and species – including us humans – ties in with another tiny report summarized from New Scientist: “There were short-lived, rapid changes in climate between 2 and 3 million years ago, just at the time many early species of hominid arose, suggesting that the pressure was on for adaptability, a hallmark of our species.” If many early species of hominid coincided with environmental changes, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that the relationship may have been causal, and adaptability may therefore explain the origin of ALL species once life had begun. And so in place of random mutations and gradualism as keynotes of innovation (and hence of evolution), we would have communities of intelligent cells that adapt and innovate to create new techniques for survival. The more drastic the environmental change, the more rapid the response and the more radical the innovation. Natural Selection then eliminates those cell-communities that cannot adapt or whose innovations are inadequate. Evolution as sporadic revolution, or punctuated equilibrium.