Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 24, 2013, 01:18 (4016 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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.)-All this is done by chemical tweets!~!!!! All automatic reactions according to the information they operate on.
> 
> 2) "So how does a colony of bacteria decide which genetic mutations afford the greatest chance of survival and expansion? .....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-'Semantics' means a study of meanings, and they can chemically sense what they need to know. Sentient simply means responsive to or conscious of sense impressions, to quote the dictionary. All of this can be accomplished by programmed chemical reactions following or guided by the information in a plan of action.--> 
> 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 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 an intrinsic property of cells.
> www.astrobio.net/interview/211/bacterial-intelligence-Yes operating by chemical twittering
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> 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. ..... 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-
Same use of sentient. I know what he means from his book.