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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

#91

Post by procgen »

GirkovArpa wrote: post #76
Jensson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least a committee of 10 identical members wont be dumber than a single member most of the time. A committee of clones is just scaling up compute in order to solve larger problems. Imagine if you could clone yourself with your knowledge and mental state, much more useful than trying to cooperate with another human.

According to Condorcet's jury theorem, a committee of 10 identical members may be smarter than a single member.

This seems obvious to me, as there'd be ten times more computational resources.

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

#92

Post by jjk166 »

arkey wrote: post #82
Jensson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that doesn't mean people will take you seriously. In order to evolve such a system all you need is for the separate components to be useful. A cell laying still and multiplying is useful enough, so that is the baseline. Then adding a flagella to move randomly so it can move away from its waste product and keep hitting new nutrients is also useful. From there it can start to detect waste and move when it is n…

But doesn't that reduce to a point where something useful becomes from separate useless components? In your case, why would a flagella be useful if it's not propelling something? A flagella is only useful as a component of something, but not by itself.

Flagella only exist as components of something, they do not need to and shouldn't exist by themselves. If flagella spontaneously popped into existence and cells picked them up, that would be quite difficult to explain without design, but cells producing flagella because they are useful components makes perfect sense on its own.

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

#93

Post by jjk166 »

voidmain0001 wrote: post #77
wiz21c wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the size of the universe and its age, I'd say we have waited long enough for probabilities to line up and produce such a complicated design.

I read a quote once that said “Simple bacteria can divide about every 20 minutes and have many hundreds of different proteins, each containing 20 types of amino acids arranged in chains that might be several hundred long. For bacteria to evolve by beneficial mutations one at a time would take much, much longer than three or four billion years, the time that many scientists believe life has existed on earth.” I haven'…

It's the "one at a time" that is the issue here. Evolution is a massively parallel process. If a beneficial mutation happens once every million gnerations, and a generation is 20 minutes, that's a beneficial mutation every 38 years. If you have a million cells, that's a beneficial mutation every 20 minutes. If you have a billion cells, that's 1000 beneficial mutations every 20 minutes. In your body there are around 40 trillion cells. There are something like 10^31 cells on earth.

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

#94

Post by pas »

wslh wrote: post #71
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…

> Part of our problem is the way we think. I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. I agree that, in general, we humans, downgrade the importance of external stimulus and interactions with our environment (including other people). My two cents is that this is downplayed where we live in cities and don't move too much, once you move to very distanct places and cultures (and not assuming yours is the best one…

it's hard to forget about others in a city though. you have neighbors, traffic, etc. that's why the whole 'cabin in the woods' experience can be sold as a relative luxury nowadays.

that said, based on the status quo we definitely don't spend enough resources on making sure we can peacefully and sustainably live next to others.

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

#95

Post by basil-rash »

martythemaniak wrote: post #88
yehosef wrote: post #68

Am I allowed to think this is too complicated to be an accident?

I find this to be an incredibly bizarre thing to say. Nobody is stopping you from thinking anything, of course you're allowed and surely you know this very well. I suspect what you're really saying is "Will you still respect me for being a creationist". And the answer is, LOL of course not. Nobody is entitled to have their wacky ideas be respected. A lot of the "free speech" complaints are really demands that other p…

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.

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

#96

Post by lebek »

jjk166 wrote: post #92
arkey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't that reduce to a point where something useful becomes from separate useless components? In your case, why would a flagella be useful if it's not propelling something? A flagella is only useful as a component of something, but not by itself.

Flagella only exist as components of something, they do not need to and shouldn't exist by themselves. If flagella spontaneously popped into existence and cells picked them up, that would be quite difficult to explain without design, but cells producing flagella because they are useful components makes perfect sense on its own.

I think he's saying, random mutation wouldn't produce all required components at once. One mutation gives you a bit of a flagella, another gives you bit of a nose, but how does the flagella mutation survive to coexist with the nose mutation that makes it useful.

I suspect the answer is that having flagella without a nose is still better than having no flagella. If so it suggests evolution isn't good at accessing groups of mutations that aren't individually beneficial.

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

#97

Post by dekhn »

bell-cot wrote: post #42
Jensson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't simulate the intelligence of a cell using just a handfull of analogue components. Cell intelligence is still beyond us. People tend to underestimated cells just like you do here.

Article subtitle: The story of E. coli chemotaxis I'm not thinking of simulating the whole cell. And last I heard, a DC full of computers can't fully simulate one sucrose molecule.

Sure, a DC full of computers can fully simulate a sucrose molecule at a detailed level of description. You wouldn't need a DC- it could be done on a single machine. The real question is, why would you need to model things at the molecular level of detail if that detail is not necessary to recapitulate the behavior of a cell?

One thng I've learned from over a decade of simulating proteins and nucleic acids is that those methods, while mathematically interesting, don't provide useful data given the amount of resources they require. Instead, reduced models (effectively embeddings) and careful statistical methods are much, much more productive.

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

#98

Post by dekhn »

jmyeet wrote: post #52

So I have three thoughts about this. The first is cell specialization, particularly neurons. It seems like nature really came up with a universal neuron. There aren't neurons for eyesight vs thinking, etc. They've experimented with this on frogs where they've reweired the optic nerve to a different part ofd the brain and the frog seems to see just fine. They've even added an eye and the frog seems to cope and use it…

Are you sure JPL needs supercomputers to calculate flight plans? Please, if you know of more details, I'd like to see them. I was reading the NASA supercomputer complaint and it looks like trajectories can be calculated on extremely conventional small high performance computers now.

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

#99

Post by ramraj07 »

seatac76 wrote: post #13

Fantastic read! If y’all are into this kind of stuff I highly recommend reading “The Song of the cell” by Siddhartha Mukherjee[1], it is one of the best books I’ve read that made the topic of biology approachable. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Song-Cell-Exploration-Medicine-Human/...

What does this book talk about that his previous book the Gene doesn’t?

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

#100

Post by sublimefire »

seatac76 wrote: post #13

Fantastic read! If y’all are into this kind of stuff I highly recommend reading “The Song of the cell” by Siddhartha Mukherjee[1], it is one of the best books I’ve read that made the topic of biology approachable. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Song-Cell-Exploration-Medicine-Human/...

He is a great storyteller, 2 other very successful and interesting books of his:

- The emperor of all maladies - about cancer research, for which he got a Pulitzer

- The gene - about the evolution of the field and the discoveries and what is the latest thinking

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