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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

#191
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just to be clear here, are you talking about the 'left-brain, right-brain' thing? Because I thought that was pretty well debunked. Also, I think you are talking about the corpus callosum for the 'bus' right?

>Because I thought that was pretty well debunked.

Only when it comes to "left/right side analytical/creative" split, and even that mainly based in a single 2013 study, which could have all kinds of issues. Not regarding different functions in general.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that is physics.

You used my own point to "gotcha", so I guess that's Hackernews!

A gotcha was not intended. I commented in your support, with mild humor implied.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I guess a fancy narrative.

Even that is physics.

The Froghurt is also cursed. Which also is a fancy narrative. It's fancy self-referential narratives all the way down.

(Good point and agreed, but who am I to pass up meme potential. ;)

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

#194
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…

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/793/

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

#195
post #163
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a monkeys bangs on keys forever it will eventually produce Shakespeare? I'm quite skeptical

Obviously yes, hence we are the monkeys banging on the keyboard. Evolution just boosted those that made interesting strings because it gave a survival advantage.

It is an established rule that, “If a being has unity, it can only have issued from a single being, from one hand.” Particularly if it displays a comprehensive life within a perfect order and sensitive balance, it demonstrates self-evidently that it did not issue from numerous hands, which are the cause of conflict and confusion, but that it issued from a single hand that is All-Powerful and All-Wise.

Therefore, to attribute such a well-ordered and well-balanced being which has unity to the jumbled hands of innumerable, lifeless, ignorant, aggressive, unconscious, chaotic, blind and deaf natural causes, the blindness and deafness of which increase with their coming together and intermingling among the ways of numberless possibilities, is as unreasonable as accepting innumerable impossibilities all at once. If we leave this impossibility aside and assume that material causes have effects, these effects can only occur through direct contact and touch. However, the contact of natural causes is with the exteriors of living beings. And yet we see that the interiors of such beings (like a Single Cell) , where the hands of material causes can neither reach nor touch, are ten times more delicate, well-ordered and perfect as regards art than their exteriors. Therefore, although tiny animate creatures, on which the hands and organs of material causes can in no way be situated, indeed they cannot touch the creatures’ exteriors all at once even, are more strange and wonderful as regards their art and creation than the largest creatures, to attribute them to those lifeless, unknowing, crude, distant, vast, conflicting, deaf and blind causes can result only from a deafness and blindness compounded to the number of animate beings.(from light of Quran)

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

#196
post #186
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing most people have difficulty wrapping their head around. What you need to remember is it's not the structures evolving, it's the instructions evolving. If for example you have a small molecular pump that the cell uses to suck up sodium ions, and a mutation causes the part of the rotor sticking out of the cell to just be longer, which might be due to a single change to the gene controlling the length o…

But again you're starting with a fairly complex system already, the molecular pump. And my (limited) understanding is that changes that are not useful or helpful would get lost. And additional to that, if an organism has a pump (which it needs to function properly) and that pump suddenly is no pump, it's a very bad flagellum, that organism has a very big problem. It's like if we swapped our arms for wings. Wings are…

> and that pump suddenly is no pump, it's a very bad flagellum, that organism has a very big problem

Cells has many duplicates of pumps, not just one. Switching one of those to a motor to move around the liquids so the pumps can get to new molecules to absorb will be extremely beneficial to the cell, now all pumps are more efficient at just the cost of a single pump.

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

#197
The one way signaling of the cell to alter tue production of chemicals kinda reminds me of thermostat adaptive weighted load balancing. Signals from nodes say that it can take more or should take less load, hot nodes shed automatically to cold nodes. And since it is weighted, if all nodes report hot, no load is shedded until full saturation of the cluster.

Kinda felt similar to the cell comms. I wonder what interesting distributed coordination ideas we could learn in distributed systems computing from cellular biology.

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

#198
This kind of unicellular complexity & intelligence has long been my soapbox material in the AGI debate. Even long before the current LLM craze, people were counting neurons in the brain and making bold claims about machine intelligence - in just X years, we'll have a machine with the computational power of the brain!

But of course, every neuron in the brain is bafflingly complex and we still don't know or understand how that complexity manifests itself in thought and intelligence. Given physics and the interactions of "things", every cell in the brain is more complex than the LLMs we're using today. Not to say that every cell is capable of producing the same output as an LLM of course, just that the behavior that it contributes to the overall system is that complex.

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

#199
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then please provide a consistent with observations theory on how physics has changed with time. Or do you have to throw thermodynamics out the window because you've gone and screwed causality? One side has a whole bunch of consistent observational evidence. The other side has a lot of frantic handwaving and inconsistent data points. The point being is, creationists have zero idea why they think 6,000 is some magic nu…

> looking at things like RNA/DNA mutation rates in known species it's pretty damned easy to see that things have been around a whole lot longer than 6k years Again, please understand the underlying assumptions you are making when you concoct statements like this. Namely: DNA/RNA started as a single form and has mutated at a constant rate since then. You have no evidence to support that, and I disagree with every comp…

Then lay down a dissertation that at least provides some evidence you're correct.

Also, any guesses on why the 'modern' age is suddenly going in slow motion. Not exactly sure how you're going to pull that off without breaking chemistry completely.

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

#200

This kind of unicellular complexity & intelligence has long been my soapbox material in the AGI debate. Even long before the current LLM craze, people were counting neurons in the brain and making bold claims about machine intelligence - in just X years, we'll have a machine with the computational power of the brain! But of course, every neuron in the brain is bafflingly complex and we still don't know or understand…

Brain is basically running a matrix-like simulation with a central person in it, for AGI we just need to simulate the thinking parts which is a simpler problem. But who knows how much simpler...
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