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The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

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Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#141

Post by hosh »

talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

Going at it a bit sideways, there's also a sense of self that's constructed in which narratives forms around it ... and yet, there's a way of experiencing the world without that separate sense of self.

Complex adaptive systems can be nested. Human families, communities, societies, governments all form greater gestalts in which humans, themselves complex adaptive system are a part of.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#142

Post by basil-rash »

Kerb_ wrote: post #116
basil-rash wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, because the creationists generally feel the exact same about evolutionists. Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.

That's cool and all, but do you give an equal amount of credit to Young Earth Creationists and regular creationists? Because both are equally based in faith. It is equally possible some holy being made fake dinosaur bones 6000 years ago to fool us, and no amount of scientific rigor can compete with a being with the foresight to know exactly how we would test the bones. At what point is "umm we obviously have evidence…

It’s important to understand why we think the bones are over 6,000 years old, and especially consider what assumptions we make in determining that age. Most importantly, the time invariance of physics.

Really it boils down to whether you believe the laws of physics we observe now have been constant throughout time. If you do you’re called an evolutionist, if you don’t you’re called a creationist. Neither side has any proof, nor is any proof fundamentally possible.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#143

Post by basil-rash »

burnished wrote: post #109
basil-rash wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, because the creationists generally feel the exact same about evolutionists. Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.

Oh they really aren't. Its sort of a tired rhetorical ploy pitting them as faith based beliefs on equal intellectual footing though. Both are theories about the world. 'Creationism' as a theory really only became pure faith very recently as most specific claims attributable to it have been disproven or better explanations have been found. For a long time it was a perfectly cogent theory.

This is objectively false. Evolution explains absolutely nothing creationism doesn’t, and creationism explains a whole lot that evolution cannot. For instance, universal origins and the formation of cells.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#144

Post by basil-rash »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #124
basil-rash wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, because the creationists generally feel the exact same about evolutionists. Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.

No, evolution is not faith based. If you want something faith based, which creationism purports to resolve, it would be if someone has a strong belief on how abiogenesis actually happened, since that is something that is still not well understood. But, we see evolution happening all around us, all the time.

It most certainly is. Evolutionists believe in the time invariance of the laws of physics with no proof, creationists believe the processes by why things have changed in the universe (“physics”, broadly) have changed over time, also with no proof. That there is some external influence that we cannot directly observe that has some massive impact on the development of the universe in ways we cannot explain.

(Funnily, physics have come to acknowledge the same, but they call it dark matter and say it’s all very scientific, whatever it is. But this is unknown enough to be not worth much discussion.)

Regarding the evolution we see around us all the time, I and many creationists besides me have full confidence in the idea that micro-evolution does occur. That there is a stochastic gradient decent process that hones in on time-varying local maxima over generations cannot really be denied. But that provides absolutely no answer to the questions of abiogenesis and speciation en-masse.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#145

Post by aradox66 »

tshaddox wrote: post #56
talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

> I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. And yet I am. Your adaptive system has a very complex model of the environment. You can model yourself as an agent in the environment, and you identify as parts of that agent. I say “parts,” because there is a ton of thinking and actions that your adaptive system performs which you do not identify as you .

Yes - all of our conscious reality, including both the environment and our sense of self, are experiences of perception formed inside the mind by the body and brain. Our sense of an "external" world is very much an "internal" reality, and the boundary between self and world is a mental construct.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#147

Post by gfjx45234 »

Balgair wrote: post #137
ta8645 wrote: post #50

> I never liked the way biology was taught in high school. It was too much about the names of things. A subject so vast is spoiled by a textbook, which can only point at the endless parade of stuff-there-is-to-know. Amen. You could easily teach quite intricate biology in grade school, if you focused on a fascinating example or two. How many more people would be inspired, rather than bored?

I cannot disagree more here. Biology is just astoundingly complicated, especially micro-bio. Lets look at the 'Central Dogma' of biology as a point to focus on a bit. It's the idea of 'information' transfer. DNA gets decoded into RNA which then gets decoded into Protiens, right? Easy peasy little discussion. You go into how DNA works a bit, it's structure, it's functions. Then you go a bit more into RNA and the vario…

> Biology is just astoundingly complicated, especially micro-bio.

Do you mean molecular biology instead, which includes the study of central dogma?

(That's a common terminology hiccup, lots of people get this wrong)

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#148

Post by treprinum »

mrkstu wrote: post #106
talkingtab wrote: post #45

The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building…

As can be seen by the specializations between human brain hemispheres. There is a bus between them, but when that communication is cut, and you can see that a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.

When Covid hit me, it felt like having a stroke and the effect was that I suddenly perceived that I don't have enough energy to sustain vision, instead I could perceive the delineation between object localization, object recognition, character-to-text conversion etc. It was like the brain was an engine that suddenly lacked fuel (I could force individual parts to "work" at the cost of immense pain) and dissolved into individual services competing for resources. The experience was both frightening and awesome. Not sure how I survived that (it took over 3 years to get back to normal). Diffuse MRI didn't find anything anyway.

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#149

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

whelp_24 wrote: post #34
bell-cot wrote: post #26

On the one hand, this is extremely cool science. OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".

I think intelligence is the correct word. Why not?

Why not just use something descriptive like "food finding mechanism".

It's also seems odd to call it "baffling" when they 100% understand how it works!

Re: The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis

#150

Post by dekhn »

Balgair wrote: post #137
ta8645 wrote: post #50

> I never liked the way biology was taught in high school. It was too much about the names of things. A subject so vast is spoiled by a textbook, which can only point at the endless parade of stuff-there-is-to-know. Amen. You could easily teach quite intricate biology in grade school, if you focused on a fascinating example or two. How many more people would be inspired, rather than bored?

I cannot disagree more here. Biology is just astoundingly complicated, especially micro-bio. Lets look at the 'Central Dogma' of biology as a point to focus on a bit. It's the idea of 'information' transfer. DNA gets decoded into RNA which then gets decoded into Protiens, right? Easy peasy little discussion. You go into how DNA works a bit, it's structure, it's functions. Then you go a bit more into RNA and the vario…

Modern biology is very much not an exception to the central dogma; it still remains central. Don't mistake the vehemence of the RNA biologists (of which I used to be one) for impact or significance (for example, the central dogma had no opinion of whether the ribosome was a protein machine, or an RNA machine, or a protein-RNA machine where RNA formed the critical core components).

The only really important detail that wasn't in the original dogma is reverse transcriptase, and they added a dotted line to support that once it was found in physical form.

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