Brain complexity: circadian controls (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 07, 2015, 19:04 (3335 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You keep missing the point I make. I equate the automatism of my own cells as proof single celled animals are its equivalent. Shapiro studies bacteria, not human kidney cells. I am not sure he recognizes any aspect of my thought pattern.-I don't know what point I have missed. You have made it abundantly clear that you think all our cells act automatically and so do bacteria. But many scientists argue that bacteria are intelligent and so are our cells. The article you quoted on wound repair was unequivocal on that score: “Our highest capacities...are objectively imaged in our own biological organism right down to the molecular activity of our cells.” Margulis, McClintock and Shapiro draw the opposite conclusion from you, and Albrecht-Büehler wrote a book on the subject, entitled Cell Intelligence. 
 
www.basic.northwestern.edu/g-buehler/summary.htmCached-QUOTE: My research for the past 30 years or so was devoted to examine whether cells have such signal integration and control center(s). The results suggest that mammalian cells, indeed, posess [sic] intelligence. The experimental basis for this conclusion is presented in the following web pages.-NB His work is based on experiment, not on philosophy.-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." (my bold) - See more at: 
http://www.astrobio.net/interview/bacterial-intelligence/#sthash.lL4xCA7j.dpuf-BARBARA McCLINTOCK: “Every component of the organism is as much of an organism as every other part.”
 
I know you disagree. But you have conceded that the odds are 50/50. That alone is ground enough to take their research seriously, and to consider its possible implications for how evolution might work.