Ants, slime mold & bacteria (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, April 28, 2016, 11:48 (3129 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: More on slime mold which can habituate/learn to put up with noxious agents that are harmless, but has no memory for that habituation:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160427081533.htm - QUOTE: For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that an organism devoid of a nervous system is capable of learning. A team from the Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CNRS/Université Toulouse III -- Paul Sabatier) has succeeded in showing that a single-celled organism, the protist Physarum polycephalum, is capable of a type of learning called habituation. This discovery throws light on the origins of learning ability during evolution, even before the appearance of a nervous system and brain. - *** - QUOTE: Initially reluctant to travel through the bitter substances, the molds gradually realized that they were harmless, and crossed them increasingly rapidly -- behaving after six days in the same way as the control group. The cell thus learned not to fear a harmless substance after being confronted with it on several occasions, a phenomenon that the scientists refer to as habituation. After two days without contact with the bitter substance, the mold returned to its initial behavior of distrust. Furthermore, a protist habituated to caffeine displayed distrustful behavior towards quinine, and vice versa. Habituation was therefore clearly specific to a given substance. - David's comment: Fascinating. The authors have no opinion as to how this works. Without nerves it all has to be chemical reactions, as there is no fixed memory from the experience. - I always feel a little guilty when you produce these wonderful articles and I then disagree with your conclusions! If an organism changes its behaviour over a period of six days, but then reverts after a two day gap, it has what I would call short-term memory. It is impossible to learn anything if you have no memory at all. If an organism can remember not only what it learned a couple of days ago, but also what it liked and didn't like - even if it's only for a week - I would suggest that 	learning and memory (albeit short-term) appear to be possible without a nervous system. It was already known that slime mold had abilities “such as solving a maze, avoiding traps or optimizing its nutrition”, and if you now add learning and memory - no matter how rudimentary - I would say you have the beginnings of autonomous intelligence (not to be confused with human self-awareness, of course). What other attributes does an organism need before you acknowledge that it is intelligent? Or are you going to tell us that God has preprogrammed or personally “guides” every individual slime mold to cope with every individual problem that life and/or humans throw at it?