The biochemistry of cell adhesion and communication (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 23, 2015, 17:50 (3039 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If God did not preprogramme every single communal, communicative decision made by humans/wolves/ants/bacteria, they must have the means of making their own decisions. You will accept that for humans and wolves, perhaps hesitate over ants, but you are absolutely certain that your God preprogrammed every single bacterial response to every single situation that bacteria have faced since the year dot.

DAVID: I think consciousness is required for the decision-making you describe. Therefore, bacteria and cells don't autonomously decide. We don't know if ants could be conscious, but they have brains. So possibly their instincts have a degree of autonomous variability.-Instincts, of course, are not governed by conscious intelligence, so you're not giving much away here. The problem is not why behaviour is repeated (if it's beneficial, natural selection will ensure that it survives) but how it started in the first place. You have just posted two more natural wonders: another parasitic wasp and bats that manoeuvre better than birds, and you ask: “Could this behavior have developed naturally?” And “Living organisms are amazingly inventive. Or were they helped?” Do you really and truly believe that God had to preprogramme or personally design these wonders in order to produce humans or food for humans? I agree that such behaviour is a far cry from the invention of a kidney. But once you grant organisms inventive autonomy, you have a clear explanation for the “helter-skelter” animal evolution you have acknowledged. The trouble is, it conflicts with your personal reading of your God's mind. 
 
dhw: My alternative is that cells cooperated to work out what they needed to do in order to filter waste, just as leaf-cutting ants cooperated to work out their own complex way to dispose of their waste, with particular ants taking on their very specialized roles. Only when cell/ant communities are faced with new problems does this cooperation require departure from the automatic role. Then decisions are made, and that is when cellular/ant intelligence is no longer automatic.
DAVID: You are back to committees of cells working out roles. This requires experimentation in itty-bitty steps with no evidence of it in evolution.-There is no evidence of God's 3.8-billion-year old computer programme for all innovations or personal intervention. We can only speculate.
 
dhw: But "my" experts keep telling me that bacteria are cognitive, sentient beings and not automatons. If we accept the term “artificial intelligence” for computers, I am asking what attributes in addition to Shapiro's list would in your eyes distinguish automatons from autonomous beings.
DAVID: Your same old approach. Computers do what they are told to do.-Computers are not living organisms that reproduce, adapt to changing conditions of all sorts, spontaneously form communities with or wage war on other computers. Bacterial intelligence is natural, not artificial. And it is not “my” same old approach. I only know what I read, and I am not in any position to tell cellular biologists who maintain that bacteria are sentient, cognitive beings that they are absolutely wrong.