All our discussions are centring again on the nature of the cell, and I will try to draw them together on this one thread.
 
Ants: you persist with your example of them finding the way, and refuse to consider the mantis example and the building of giant cities to house, shelter, rear and feed millions of inhabitants. Your focus on biochemicals is the equivalent of the atheist materialist insisting that since science has shown the biochemical processes at work during human thought, it will only be a matter of time before science finds a biochemical explanation of thought. You focus on the biochemical processes that accompany perception, memory and responses in ants, and assume there is no ability to put facts together, plan strategies, take decisions. You do the same with cells and cell communities. But this is assumption and not scientific fact. How does one distinguish between what seems to be intelligent and what is intelligent?-dhw: The list of incidents concerning transplant patients [...] makes it clear that[...] some cell communities (organs) retain individual characteristics and memories, and are able not only to pass them onto other cell communities, but can even change the make-up of those communities (e.g. sexual orientation, taste). Quite apart from the suggestion that the brain is not the only container of memory (in contrast to what you say above), all of this has far-reaching implications.-DAVID: Your statement, I think only supports my suggesting that species consciousness contains memory.
 
But these cases differ completely from species consciousness, since they focus on the ability of cell communities to take on and transfer individual characteristics and memories, and to influence other cell communities in the new body. Both concepts involve memory.-DAVID: You need to quote a large study of transplant recipients to make your version stick.-I'm prepared at least provisionally to accept the veracity of these cases, just as I accept the veracity of certain NDE cases ... particularly when otherwise unknowable information is authenticated by third parties. I have no explanation for either kind of experience, but take both seriously enough to speculate on their implications. If individual characteristics and memories can be transferred from one cell community to another, this may suggest that cells in all creatures inherit more general memories that guide their instincts and some form of species consciousness. It may also suggest that cells and cell communities can cooperate to incorporate something new ... essential to the process of evolutionary innovation ... and can use memory to change one another.-DAVID: Again, you pursue hunt and peck to create complicated organs. Pipedream.-There is no hunt and peck. Your own hypothesis entails your God preprogramming organisms to produce innovations through cellular cooperation in accordance with environmental conditions. There is no difference in the process itself. But mine has the cells deliberately cooperating (possibly with an intelligence provided by your God) instead of being preprogrammed to come up with the same combination. You complain that my hypothesis is not borne out by biochemistry, and I have asked you to name any biochemist who supports your own. Your response is that "Larry Moran certainly won't refer to the divine." 90% of biochemists are against you, and I wonder how many of the remaining 10% favour the divine preprogramming of eukaryotes to produce all the innovations leading to humans. 
 
In response to my Archie Optrex fairy tale, you wrote: "As an author and playwright your imagination is marvelous." As a scientist and non-fiction writer, you do pretty well yourself. I would never dare to conjure up an imaginary, self-aware being that came from nowhere, can create whole universes and yet also the tiniest conceivable organisms which he packs with programmes that over billions of years transform them into billions of extraordinary machines without their even knowing what they're doing. I won't say nobody would believe me, but I certainly wouldn't believe myself!-DAVID: Please remember that sentient means receiving signals and sensations and reacting to them.-Many definitions include the word "conscious" or "aware", which I take to mean aware of the signals and, above all, the sensations or feelings. Otherwise, they would not need to change. That does not mean they are self-aware, abstract-thinking philosophers. However, I do not think "sentient beings" can be automatons (which have no feelings). Similarly I think that Shapiro himself and Margulis and Albrecht-Buehler use words like conscious and intelligent to mean aware of feelings and perceptions, and able to assess information, take decisions, communicate, solve problems. We know Margulis was an agnostic, and Albrecht-Buehler emphatically rejects the ID movement, so I fear you cannot count these scientists among your allies in a world of biochemistry which by and large unequivocally rejects your theory of divinely preprogrammed automatons. If random mutations seem increasingly unlikely, perhaps Margulis and Co have opened up a "third way".

In the 1920's in England Blue/Great Tits learned how to raid milk bottles for cream. After a WWII hiatus they learned all over again, faster than the first time, as discussed by Sheldrake. Now they are the subject of colored feeder training:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/flying-high-research-unveils-birds-learning-power-1484762376

"Dr. Aplin and her colleagues studied the Great Tits in Wytham Woods near Oxford. Biologists there fitted out hundreds of birds, 90% of the population, with transponder tags, like bird bar codes, that let them track the birds’ movements.

"Dr. Aplin showed the birds a feeder with a door painted half blue and half red. The birds lived in separate groups in different parts of the wood. Two birds from one group learned that when they pushed the blue side of the feeder from left to right, they got a worm. Another two birds from another group learned the opposite technique; they only got the worm when they pushed the red side from right to left. Then the researchers released the birds back into the wild and scattered feeders throughout the area. The feeders would work with either technique.

"The researchers tracked which birds visited the feeders and at what time, as well as which technique they used. The wild birds rapidly learned by watching those trained in the lab. The blue-group birds pushed the blue side, while the red group pushed the red. And new birds who visited a feeder imitated the birds at that site, even though they could easily have learned that the other technique worked, too.
Then the researchers used a social-network analysis to track just which birds liked to hang out with which other birds. Like people on Facebook, birds were much more likely to learn from other birds in their social network than from birds they spent less time with. Also like humans, young birds were more likely to adopt the new techniques than older ones.

"Most remarkably, the traditions continued into the next year. Great Tits don’t live very long, and only about 40% of the birds survive to the next season. But though the birds had gone, their discoveries lived on. The next generation of the blue group continued to use the blue technique.

"We often assume that only animals who are closely related to us will share our cognitive abilities. The new research suggests that very different species can evolve impressive learning skills that suit their particular environmental niche. Great Tits—like honeybees, humpbacks and humans—are sophisticated foragers who learn to adapt to new environments. The young American graduate student and the young Great Tit at her door both learned to become masters of the British bottle."

Comment; Not so much instinct as learning what they see and passing it on. The issue is whether it gets encoded into DNA, or whether surviving adults show the youngsters the trick. Humpbacks in the middle of the century taught themselves in Alaska how to bubble feed: a circle of them blow a circle of bubbles and surface within the circle eating everything there. They have done it ever since.