The Intelligent Cell (Origins)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 13, 2011, 20:34 (4524 days ago)

A belated obituary of Lynn Margulis in yesterday’s Guardian links up with David’s post(s) on life’s biological complexities, and highlights some of her extraordinary insights.

One of these, frequently referred to by David et al, was that some 3.5 bn years ago single-celled organisms combined with others to increase their complexity. “[...] tiny membrane-bound organelles that inhabit in their hundreds each of the trillions of cells that make up every organ of our bodies, were once free-living creatures, before being incorporated into the symbiotic life forms which were our distant ancestors.” She also argued that organisms were “active self-organising constructors of their own destiny.” The insight that evolution owes just as much to co-operation as it does to competition is every bit as profound as Darwin’s, and certainly restores much needed balance to the view that life is a battlefield.

We’ve discussed the following before, but the fact that we’re a combination of trillions of trillions of “living creatures” is surely worth another few thoughts. Vast areas of our bodies operate without our being even aware that they’re there (till they go wrong). Every organ of every organism is a community which knows precisely what it has to do – like the members of an ant colony. There are built-in repair systems with spare parts, and whole armies of soldiers ready to do battle against unwelcome intruders. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that every single one of these organs at one time never existed. It took trillions of cells to get together in order to invent them and hone them into perfect functioning order.

Even if you don’t believe in God, you have to acknowledge some innate form of intelligence that enables these cells to get together, to invent new mechanisms, and to keep the mechanisms functioning. I can’t see any way round that conclusion. I’m not arguing that they make conscious decisions in the way humans do, but I am most definitely arguing that these vast assemblies of cells cannot have achieved their functioning complexities just by being swirled in the water or blown by the wind. There is method in their meetings.

No-one knows what lies behind it all. If theists could look beyond their various blinkered visions of a supreme being, and if atheists could look beyond their blinkered belief that there’s NOTHING behind it all except materials hitting on a lucky formula, they would all be able to see that the mechanisms of life and evolution reveal a form of intelligence as yet unknown to us. We shall probably never find out how it came about in the first place, but we should keep an open mind as we consider all its astonishing manifestations, in whatever form.

At least one website says that Lynn Margulis, though born Jewish, was an agnostic. That figures.