Bacterial Intelligence? sensing surfaces (General)

by dhw, Monday, October 30, 2017, 12:52 (2579 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And the whole process can easily be understood as a demonstration of how bacteria use their autonomous intelligence to adapt chemical processes to the requirements of new situations.

DAVID: And the study author's abstract says: "Here, we describe a tactile sensing cascade in Caulobacter crescentus in which the flagellar motor acts as sensor."
Simply a cascade [in biochemistry speak]is a series of molecular reactions. It is automatic, not thoughtful.

dhw: Once your automatic faculties have provided you with all the information, you take a conscious decision to respond in a certain way (behaviour), and that decision sets in motion a cascade of molecular reactions as your body implements the decision you have taken. You say the decisions are automatic in bacteria but conscious in humans, but you admit there is no way of telling the difference.

DAVID: If God is universal consciousness, then perhaps bacteria share a bit of it. More likely they function automatically with the instructions they operate upon.

Who says it is “more likely”? But thank you for the concession. At least you are no longer insisting that bacteria have no consciousness.

DAVID: But more importantly the flagellum turns out to be even more irreducibly complex, and even more defies chance evolution. God as designer is the only reasonable answer.

We agreed about nine years ago that chance was the least likely explanation of evolution. If bacteria are as intelligent as some experts in the field believe they are, then we have a readymade explanation for the inventive complexities of evolutionary development. How that intelligence might have come into being remains a mystery, but some sort of God is as reasonable or unreasonable an explanation as any other.