cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 07, 2019, 10:07 (1934 days ago) @ dhw

Thank you for three more possible examples of cellular intelligence at work:

How plants got leaves

QUOTES: "Dr. Jill Harrison, the study's lead author and Senior Lecturer from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, explains: "By comparing our new findings from a moss with previous findings, we can see that a pre-existing genetic network was remodelled to allow shoot systems to arise in plant evolution."
"This discovery furthers our basic understanding of how genes regulate plant shape, which could inform efforts to engineer shape and improve the yield of future crops."

DAVID: Looks like pre-planning to me. Not by chance. The changes are too complex for that.

Agreed that it’s not by chance, but why “pre-planning”? Is it not possible that intelligent cells (whose intelligence may have been given to them by your God, who may have created a natural order which runs itself, as in “Reading God’s divine nature”) worked out a way of improving their chances of survival by making fuller use of their environment?

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Horizontal gene transfer

Quotes: Cell-cell signaling allows a cell to spread the word to its neighbors that it already has a copy of ICEBs1, so there's no need to bother assembling the transfer machinery. If this fails, exclusion kicks in to physically block the transfer machinery from penetrating the recipient cell. If that proves unsuccessful and the second copy enters the recipient, immunity will initiate and prevent the second copy from being integrated into the recipient's chromosome.
"'Each mechanism acts at a different step, because none of them alone are 100 percent effective," Grossman says. "That's why it's helpful to have multiple mechanisms."
They don't know all the details of this transfer machinery just yet, he adds…

Doesn’t cell-cell signalling suggest that cells know what they are doing? And of course nobody knows all the details: nobody knows how intelligence works.

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Introducing the brain

QUOTE: Brain cells, or neurons, constantly tinker with their circuit connections, a crucial feature that allows the brain to store and process information. While neurons frequently test out new potential partners through transient contacts, only a fraction of fledging junctions, called synapses, are selected to become permanent.

It sounds as though the cells make their own decisions about tinkering and selecting.