Ants, slime mold & bacteria (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, April 29, 2016, 16:23 (3128 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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. .....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? - DAVID: Thanks, and I expect you to disagree! I can imagine a molecular response to the noxious stimulus that lasts two days and fades away. The response may be God provided. As for this response like other cellular responses, we are looking in from the out side and making interpretations that may well not be correct. - “God provided”? 3.8 billion years ago, God did provide for a 21st-century slime mold to tolerate caffeine but not quinine, and ordained that a few days later it would forget what it did like and what it did dislike. Or in 2016 God did see the slime mold and the caffeine and the quinine, and on the first day did say unto the slime mold, “Thou shalt tolerate the caffeine but not the quinine, and then in six days thou shalt forget what I have taught thee.” I don't believe it, but perhaps you can tell us another way God might have “guided” the slime mold, and why he would have gone to such trouble when all he wants is us humans.