Plant automatic response to climate change (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 30, 2018, 08:42 (1950 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I didn’t make a wish, though I’m delighted to hear that you now think bacteria may have the equivalent of a brain. I was trying to work out what you meant by “cellular function hasn’t really changed since the beginning of life.” As bacteria do not have brains, livers, kidneys, sex organs etc., all of which require differently functioning cells, I was simply asking for clarification. Do you mean that the organelles are primitive forms of all the different cells that later evolved after the arrival of multicellularity?

DAVID: Bacteria do everything in one cell, paralleling what multicellular organism do with many organs is all that is imparted. As for brain, don't get exited about bacteria: the bacterial genome contains instructional information to automatically provide necessary responses and to edit its DNA as Shapiro shows, nothing more.

This was not the reason for my request for clarification, but I feel obliged to repeat that Shapiro, McClintock, Margulis, Bühler and no doubt other scientists too have concluded from their research that bacteria are sentient, cognitive, decision-making organisms. We’ve been over this a hundred times, so please don’t try to downplay their conclusions. Just stick with your 50/50 chance of their/your being right.

The reason why I’m trying to pin you down is my interest in the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. If the organelles really are primitive forms of the specialist cells, then there is a parallel to the human embryo, which begins as a single cell already containing the potential for every organ in our bodies. It’s as if we are reliving the whole process of evolution from the very beginning. I’m not sure about the ramifications of this, but if it’s true, it certainly reinforces the concept of common descent, whether the process of evolution was “guided” or not.