#conscienceness — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #conscienceness, aggregated by home.social.
-
#SlimeMold #NIHfunding #conscienceness
"‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence
Scientists are battling over whether supposedly simple organisms should be considered ‘intelligent’. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place within it
Later still, in 2018, Glanzman gave mild electric shocks to a group of sea slugs, getting them so used to the experience that they stopped withdrawing their gills in alarm. From these slugs, he extracted RNA – tiny cellular molecules that help produce new proteins – and injected it into untrained slugs. A day later, the untrained slugs showed the same lack of alarm to their first electric shocks, as though the memory of the experience had been transferred along with the RNA. But in suggesting that RNA, and not the synapse, was the key to memory, it was as though he had broken some taboo about the nature of cognition. 'That paper destroyed my ability to get NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding, because people just didn’t buy it. They wouldn’t even discuss my applications. Ultimately, I had to let go of most of the people in my lab.'
(. . .)
For more than a century, scientists were sure that cognition and intelligence required neurons, the cells that make up brains and nervous systems. These neurons form and reform connections between themselves to create pathways for thought and memory. This understanding of intelligence was an implicit argument that animals occupy a special place within the living kingdom – separate to plants and microbes – and that humans are most special of all.
But since the 1980s, more and more scientists have argued that traits such as cognition are intrinsic not just to animals but to all life – a stance that Pamela Lyon, a philosopher at Adelaide University, calls 'biogenic'. Some scientists have claimed that plants connect to each other underground through networks of fungi (nicknamed the 'wood wide web'), which allow them to communicate, 'recognise' each other, and even share resources as a form of vegetal mutual aid. Others have suggested that any individual cell, even a bacterium, can make memories. And that slime moulds are intelligent.
To those of the old consensus – the neuropurists, as I came to think of them – these claims are sacrilege. Lincoln Taiz, a veteran plant physiologist, has dismissed biogenic theorists as having 'brain envy'. In 2007, a few dozen neuropurists signed a declaration in a scientific journal arguing that plants weren’t intelligent and that 'plant neurobiology” was nothing more than a pretty catchphrase. One signatory called the letter “the last serious confrontation between the scientific community and the nuthouse on these issues'.
The battle is fraught, sometimes dirty. Michael Levin, a Tufts University professor who is perhaps the most polarising figure among the biogenic group, believes that every individual cell is intelligent and cognitive in its own way; for this, he told me he regularly receives hate mail. (One letter called him 'dangerously insane'.) Anthony Trewavas, a biologist in Levin’s camp, wrote that the 2007 declaration was framed “as though plant biology would collapse if people did not sign up”. It wasn’t so much a reckoning with the biogenic stance, he complained, as 'an attempt to strangle it at birth'. When, in 2021, Lyon co-edited a special issue on cognition for the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, 'one of the reviewers told us, in effect: ‘This is the greatest thing since sliced bread’; another said: ‘This looks interesting, but I’ve got my qualms about this, this and this’; and the third said: ‘This is dangerous. You must not dignify this idea in a journal of this stature.’"