One great unchartered territory for science (there are many) is the mind. What is consciousness? And what exactly is intelligence?
I was listened to a podcast lecture from the Museum of Science in Boston about bacteria and it really is amazing how much we are learning and how much we don't yet know about what seems so simple, but isn't - the bacteria which also lives in this super-organism we call our body with us. I don't know who rules the roost, them or us?
Are bacteria really "intelligent" creatures which go about making a living by establishing colonies? And together, like spores, they learn and make intentional decisions. They may not be the automata we once thought they were. But we have not yet caught up with the knowledge base on how bacteria really make decisions.
"Recently there has been a lot of discussion of the cognitive capacities of microbes, particularly eubacteria, when they live in communities of many species (often referred to as biofilms). One of the common themes is that bacteria have a kind of cognitive capacity based on their ability to send "signals" to each other that affects the behaviour of the community." - Evolving Thoughts Blog [December 10, 2007 8:43 PM, by John S. Wilkins]
"Signal transduction is a well known, if as yet not completely understood, process. It is how neurons and other cells in our bodies affect each other by passing chemicals between themselves, and activating processes in response inside each cell. It is also how bacteria "communicate" in communities." (ibod)
All of us are built from large carbon based molecules: macromolecules. And We all share a lot of the same equipment and we are all the products of evolutionary development. What part of this process is intelligent?
The cunundrum for science is in spite of all our high tech and all the images we have of the brain, as much as we now understand molecular interactions (we only knew one tenth as much a few years ago) we still don't know how learning is accomplished beyond the firing of neurons and how axons and dendrites react to electrical stimulation and signal transduction (mentioned above).
Maybe we're looking in all the wrong places? Maybe we need to be looking at those bacteria we share our bodies with - which make up a lot more of bodies than we do and have 90% more cells than the mere 10% belonging to us. So who rules, bacteria or us? There are 100 trillion bacterial cells with bacterial DNA in our body to only 10 trillion cells with our DNA in our bodies.
The gene is the basic building block for life ON THIS PLANET. We have no idea what it would be elsewhere. Maybe it won't be carbon based? We don't know. We know a lot about genes and comparative genomics and gene sequencing has provided unimpeachable proof of evolution and the connectiveness of all life on this planet.
Why do ants in colonies individually serve the greater good of the entire colony? There is some kind of intelligence going on there - and in bee hives and in any amalgamation of animals there is a `collective' intelligence. Some animals are incredibly, shall we say, simple. Yet together that simple-mindness adds up to incredible intelligence.
So do microbes think? We don't think they do, not the way we do anyway, and not that we really know if they think?
"All life is intelligent, according to neurosurgeon Vertosick: "To be alive, one must think." A practicing neurosurgeon, Vertosick maintains that intelligence the ability to store experience and to use it to solve future problems is an emergent property of groups. Thus, bacteria, the immune system, and enzymes can be as smart as the human brain. All of these entities operate within networks that communicate and adapt to change in true Darwinian fashion. He further believes that this network paradigm of problem-solving originated at the cellular level. Unfortunately, some of his ideas, which he admits are highly speculative, seem merely an exercise in semantics. He completely avoids the issue of consciousness, which he dismisses as "irrelevant to his argument." At times, he seems unnecessarily provocative, labeling those who would disagree with him as "brain chauvinists" and arrogantly rejecting nonclinical biologists as lacking in the proper perspective." (From Library Journal - The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing - by Dr. Frank T. Vertosick Jr)
Bacteria has the advantage in Darwinian terms or evolutionary terms of altering itself very fast. Generational times are like every 15-20 minutes for bacteria. Measure that against 25 years in generational time for humans. It takes us 100 years to grind through 4 generations. Bacteria can go through 50 generations in a day.
Little Lucy (Australopithecus afarenis), the hominid, had a pea sized brain. We have about 1400 cc of brain but Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo sapiens and we survived, they didn't. Some say we may have eaten them. Others say we hybridized with them. I prefer that conclusion myself but we really don't know. We use to think the size of the brain determines intelligence - but we're not sure.
So when RNA is transcribing DNA due to environmental causes, i.e., ultraviolet rays, toxics, and other unhealthy things genes mutate and the beneficial mutations are exploited by their reproductive advantage over time to become the dominant gene. Just how intelligent is that? Pretty intelligent actually though not that anyone consciously thought about this gene or that one. Natural selection does the thinking for us but would you call that intelligence? It depends on how you define intelligence and how much it really does.
Bacterial colonies confront an environmental toxin and random mutant bactera are selected because the generational time is very fast that are capable of neutralizing the toxin's lethal effect. We all need to be thankful to the bacterial that lives in our guts for all the good work they do - that is in addition to extraction of nutrients we might have missed otherwise which these bacteria carry to our livers where metabolism takes place and vitamins are integrated into our cells where they do some good things.
You need to think twice when the doctors suggests streptomycin because those antibiotics may kill infection but streptomycin also binds to ribosomes and wrecks the fidelity of protein translation, killing bacterial cells indiscriminately - even good bacteria.
Of course if there is the possibility of improving one's survival with tuberculosis by using streptomycin you might want to consider using the antibiotic - unless you are confronted with resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in which case it wouldn't do you any good and might adversely affect your already ailing health.
Mutations are NOT so plentiful and beneficial mutations are rare. Most mutations are inconsequential. They don't matter and they aren't selected. Another words, as Frank Vertosick (also previous reference above) in The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing, writes, "random mutation alone seems inadquate for the task at hand. It seems like, if Vertosick's thesis is correct, that some intelligence is necessary for antibiotic resistance so maybe evolution is getting a little help from intelligent bacteria colonies? He goes on to say, "Like professional gamblers at a Vegas blackjack table, bacteria know the game is random, but they also know a few tricks that can tilt the odds heavily in their favor."
How about abiotic stress sensing and GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) response in plants? Is the metabolic response the defense a plant develops which improves breeding strategies (or transgenics) a form of intelligence?
So how did we, Homo sapiens get to be so smart (whatever that really means)?
Baby"Three-quarters of a human infant's energy goes straight to the brain.. Given that babies are helpless, that sounds like a lot to spend on an organ that is cognitively useless and does little to ensure a child's survival...But human babies have extra energy to feed their brains. Unlike other primates, human newborns are born with baby fat. That lovable chub stores the energy needed to quench a baby's ravenous brain.. The fatter the baby, the healthier its brain, the thinking goes.. A diet that included fish and shellfish and particularly frogs and eggs would have provided ancient humans, and their fattening babies, with the best source of nutrients and minerals to foster brain development." - Something Fishy: How Humans Got So Smart By Corey Binns, Special to LiveScience [online]
Hank Roth
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