Biological complexity: bacteria R' us (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 08, 2017, 21:04 (2633 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: We live in symbiosis with hordes of bacteria everywhere on and in us:
http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/what-the-meadow-teaches-us?utm_source=Nautilus&u...

dhw: QUOTE: "This diversity is not neatly divided between distinct species or types but is available to all microbes within the context of symbiotic processes of exchange. The late biologist and symbiosis researcher Lynn Margulis believed, for example, that this exchange relationship meant that we should actually speak about all the bacteria on Earth as though they composed a single biological subject—one body swarming with countless cells. Consequently, we who are dominated by a bacterial ecosystem ten times larger than our own body’s cells also belong to the great continuum of life. We are literally, physically, a part of the landscape. The moment we take sustenance from it, we enfold it and its inhabitants into our bodies."

Thank you for this great article, and as always for your integrity in presenting it. You will know, of course, that Lynn Margulis was a champion of bacterial intelligence. The suggestion is that our bodies are inhabited by other intelligent beings, and this observation can be extended to the whole of life and the whole history of evolution. Your God may be the source of that intelligence, but if this article and Margulis, McLintock, Albrecht-Bühler, Shapiro and others are correct, there is no way you can dismiss cellular behaviour as automatic.

My usual answer. The bacteria are following intelligent instructions they have been given.