Bacterial Intelligence? making decisions chemically (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 03, 2019, 12:22 (2029 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Confused answer. The second sentence refutes the first. Does adaptation following adaptation lead to innovation (speciation ) or not?

No refutation. Speciation results from major changes, but in the section of my post that you have omitted I explained that it is sometimes difficult to separate adaptation from innovation (as in the transformation of tree-dwelling apes to bipedal humans). My proposal is that the same mechanism (cellular intelligence) is responsible both for adaptation and innovation. Straightforward cases of the former will obviously not result in speciation, whereas the latter will, but I would not like to draw a strict borderline between the two processes.