Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, November 24, 2013, 18:08 (4015 days ago) @ David Turell

"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")" www.tamar.tau.ac.il/~eshel/html/intelligence_of_Bacteria-html-DAVID: All that is done by chemical tweets!~!!! All automatic reactions according to the information they operate on.-You are determined to ignore the context of each statement and the conclusions these scientists draw. Chemical tweets are the bacterial equivalent of our language. "To make sure they all know what they are doing" = communication. "Act jointly", "process information", "solve problems", "make decisions", "save for the future"...You could hardly wish for clearer signs of intelligence.-DAVID: (referring to:) www.justburrus.blogspot.com/2010/03/bacterial-sentience-intelligence.html "Semantics" means a study of meanings, and they [bacteria] can chemically sense what they need to know.-That is not the point. Chemical sensing does not require "shared social communicative abilities". Humans also sense things chemically, but we need language to communicate our knowledge to others, we need semantics to ensure that the correct meaning is communicated, and we need efficient communication to ensure successful cooperation. All of these are signs of intelligence.-DAVID: "Sentient" simply means responsive to or conscious of sense impressions." -True. We are also sentient. And we are also able to process those impressions, and share them with others of our kind, so we are "intelligent (by communicating)" and "socially organized". If you insist that all the qualities our scientists have listed are automatic, you may as well tell us that all organisms including humans are automatons.-MARGULIS: "...intelligence is a property of life from the very beginning...it's an intrinsic property of cells." www.astrobio.net/interview/211/bacterial-intelligence
DAVID: Yes operating by chemical twittering.-That's right - cells are intelligent and communicate by chemical twittering.-SHAPIRO: 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 -DAVID: Same use of sentient. I know what he means from his book.-Perhaps you should read the article instead.
QUOTE: "[...] recognition of sophisticated information processing capacities in prokaryotic cells represents another step away from the anthropocentric view of the universe that dominated pre-scientific thinking. Not only are we no longer at the physical center of the universe; our status as the only sentient beings on the planet is dissolving as we learn more about how smart even the smallest living cells can be." -"Sentient" and "smart", as the rest of this article makes very clear with numerous examples of bacterial sophistication and cognitive abilities. He calls bacteria "cognitive entities", and concludes: 
"The selected examples of bacterial "smarts" I have given show convincingly that these small cells are incredibly sophisticated at coordinating processes involving millions of individual events and at making them precise and reliable. In addition, the astonishing versatility and mastery bacteria display in managing the biosphere's geochemical and thermodynamic transformations indicates that we have a great deal to learn about chemistry, physics and evolution from our small, but very intelligent, prokaryotic relatives."-Not just intelligent, but "very intelligent". Nowhere in this article have I found a single mention of the word automaton. The nearest is the following: "......conventional wisdom is an extension of the mechanistic views that came to dominate biological thought in the early years of the 20th Century." His article is opposed to this conventional wisdom. Another of your supporters letting you down?