Bacterial Intelligence? making decisions chemically (General)

by dhw, Thursday, May 02, 2019, 09:28 (2031 days ago) @ David Turell

I have combined the two posts on “Bacterial intelligence”:

dhw: If new conditions arise (e.g. new drugs to be combated), then of course the behaviour is new. If the species remains the same, that is adaptation. And I have suggested the possibility that in multicellular organisms, the same mechanism “might even lead to innovation” and hence evolution.

DAVID: You have again stretched adaptation to speciation. Back to pure Darwin.

dhw: I have suggested that cellular intelligence may be responsible for innovation as well as adaptation. It is a hypothesis, just like your divine preprogramming and dabbling. Please tell me where Darwin proposes that cellular intelligence might be the driving force behind evolutionary change.

DAVID: But what you stated is pure Darwin, adaptation after adaptation leading to speciation, whether by intelligent action or not. Darwin never discussed intelligence as a driving force. That is your imagined process.

I have not stated that adaptation after adaptation leads to speciation, and Darwin himself proposed random mutations, not cellular intelligence, as key to innovation. I have suggested that the same mechanism (cellular intelligence) responsible for adaptation – a process we know takes place – may also be responsible for innovation. Nothing to do with Darwin. However, unlike you, I do not reject Darwin just because he’s Darwin. We do not know the precise borderline between adaptation and innovation, and there can be no doubt that, for instance, the history of bipedalism described under “Arthropithicus” does entail one adaptation after another. However, the Cambrian remains the prime example of apparent leaps. It may be that cellular intelligence is able to exploit sudden changes in the environment to create the innovations which drive evolution forwards.

DAVID: I can certainly agree that conscious organisms (without self-awareness) show intelligence.

dhw: Thank you. And bearing in mind that the majority of modern scientists apparently agree that bacteria are (rather than seem to be) intelligent, you can hardly assert with any authority that intelligent human behaviour is autonomous but intelligent bacterial behaviour is preprogrammed or dabbled.

DAVID: Nothing factual here just consensus opinion. Cells actions are seen only from outside the cell. Still 50/50 probability as to how it is achieved.

Consensus opinion is often the nearest we can get to the objective truth, but I am not saying my hypothesis is a fact. Nor is God, and nor is your opinion that cells are automatons.

DAVID: Yes, I refuse to accept innate cellular intelligence. My belief is that cells are programmed to respond properly to stimuli.

And yet on 16 April under “big brain evolution”, in answer to my direct question whether you really believed your God preprogrammed or dabbled every single bacterial action, you responded that they were your suggestions as to how your God achieved his goal, and they “are not at the level of belief”. You have a dogmatic disbelief in cellular intelligence coupled with a non-belief belief in preprogramming/dabbling.

DAVID: I try to base every theory on the scientific facts we have uncovered.

dhw: I also “try to base every theory on the scientific facts we have uncovered”. I accept the logic of your scientific design argument (though of course the God hypothesis remains “totally unproven”), but your preprogammed/dabbled, anthropocentric interpretation of evolution’s history is a “totally unproven conjecture” with no scientific basis whatsoever. Cellular intelligence is a conclusion based on scientists’ observations, but its role in evolutionary innovation, if any, remains as unproven as your own hypotheses.

DAVID: Agreed. I've made intelligent guesses as to how God m ight have exerted control over evolution.

Equally unproven, and no more science-based than my own alternative “intelligent guesses”.

DAVID: Your alternative is pure speculation. I start with what science shows us as established.

dhw: You start with the established scientific fact that there have been countless numbers of life forms. You and I accept that these are the products of evolution (Tony would say this is far from being a fact.) Your above description perfectly matches the hypothesis of cellular intelligence, which is no “purer” a speculation than your hypothesis of a 3.8- billion-year-old computer programme for every single undabbled evolutionary development, from bacteria to whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage, weaverbirds’ nests and the human brain. Please stop kidding yourself that your speculations are more "scientific" than mine.

DAVID: The difference is I do my own interpretation of studies I read, and accept author's conclusions judgmentally.

There is no scientific evidence for your hypothesis above, and I do my own interpretation and pass my own judgement on your conclusion that, although you have no idea why he would have chosen it, this was his method of fulfilling his one and only goal of specially designing H. sapiens.