Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, November 23, 2013, 17:12 (4017 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

You stated with similar authority to David's that "the whole house of cards around your intelligent cell falls down" because "the ability to learn, remember, recall, communicate, reason, plan and apply are all far far beyond the scope of simple intelligence". Reasoning and planning are words I would certainly hesitate to use because they are too closely linked to abstract thinking, but I have gone back over the various threads to repeat the scientific support for the concept of the intelligent cell. Here are four quotes from different sources that suggest this is far from being a house of cards:-1) "While the number of bacteria in a colony can be more than 100 times the number of people on Earth, bacteria are twittering (" bacterial twittering" or "chemical tweeting") to make sure they all know what they all doing (by exchanging "chemical tweets"); each cell is both an actor and a spectator in the bacterial Game of Life. Acting jointly, these tiny organisms can sense the environment, process information, solve problems and make decisions so as to thrive in harsh environments. In better times, when exposed to an environment containing abundant nutrients, instead of rushing to exhaust the available resources, as human communities often do, bacteria save for the future and make sure to be prepared for hard times that might befall them in the future."
www.tamar.tau.ac.il/~eshel/html/intelligence_of_Bacteria-html
(I've had trouble getting back to this one.)-2) "So how does a colony of bacteria decide which genetic mutations afford the greatest chance of survival and expansion? Jacob, Becker, Shapira, and Levine, hold that bacteria communicate among themselves, writing, "It is clearly essential to figure out how the bacteria can obtain semantic meaning, so as to initiate, for example, the proper context-dependent transitions between different operating states of the genome (370-371)." Though the researchers do not understand the process(es) by which bacteria code messages and send them, Jacob, Becker, Shapira, and Levine do conceive that bacteria have shared social communicative abilities, which, because of the nature of language, implies a shared knowledge of the semantic meanings of their codes (371). Based on these speculations, it would indeed appear that not only are bacteria sentient (by choosing), and intelligent (by communicating), but that they are also socially organized (but civilized?)."
www.justburrus.blogspot.com/2010/03/bacterial-sentience-intelligence.html-3) MARGULIS: People think that if you can't talk, you can't be intelligent. But you know that's not true if you have a dog. You can communicate with them without talking. If you define intelligence as speaking American English, well maybe they're not. But if you define it in the much more broad sense of behaviors that are modified on the individual level, that involve choice and change and response to the environment, there's every bit of evidence that intelligence is a property of life from the very beginning. It's been modified, of course, and changed and amplified, even, but it's an intrinsic property of cells.
www.astrobio.net/interview/211/bacterial-intelligence-4) Shapiro: 40 years experience as a bacterial geneticist have taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the 20th Century. Analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation of protein synthesis, and DNA repair established that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. Studies of genetic recombination, lysogeny, antibiotic resistance and my own work on transposable elements revealed multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules. Examination of colony development and organization led me to appreciate how extensive multicellular collaboration is among the majority of bacterial species. Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell-cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of "higher" plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/2006.ExeterMeeting.pdf
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/bacteria.html-You might also care to google Guenther Albrecht-Buehler, who has written a book on the subject.

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