Randomness
Mind, the usual kind or my kind, increases the probability of survival and reproduction. It does so by injecting intelligence (capacity to communicate, solve problems and decision making) into the process of natural selection. Being cunning in avoiding predators, developing strategies for finding food increases one’s chances of surviving. Also being crafty in attracting a mate also increases one’s chances of passing on genes to the next generation.
Complexity and mind in Nature
This summarizes all that I have been saying so far on this thread. The list of those contemplating mind as having a role in nature is getting longer. I do not feel any longer that I am the only fool crying wolf. The text is long, but a very worthwhile read. If too long for your taste, then read excerpts of it. Mounting evidence may very well one day contribute to a fundamental paradigm shift in science. Do I hear a ruffle or thunder in the forest?
“In the words of philosopher Evan Thompson, “a living being is not sheer exteriority . . . but instead embodies a kind of interiority, that of its own immanent purposiveness” (2007, p. 225), and it is recently being realized that this may apply to plants as well as animals and to the unicellular as well as the multicellular. The more we learn about life, its amazing complexity and its fundamental commonality as it extends over time and space, the more it becomes clear that there must be some kind of ‘mind,’ some purposive inwardness that pushes ahead, pursuing its own life in its own way, within each living organism, ‘all the way down.’”
“Microbial life, being life, by definition is of such organized complexity that we should not be surprised to find perception, motility, and evidence of subtle responsiveness to environmental conditions even in the single-celled. The green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, for example, has an eyespot composed of rhodopsin photoreceptors that, when stimulated, release a current of calcium ions that modify its flagellar motion, orienting it toward or away from light (Kateriya et al., 2004); the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, moreover, has been described as showing ‘primitive intelligence’ by solving a maze, finding the minimum length solution joining two nutrient locations at different ends of an agar labyrinth (Nakagaki et al., 2000). Plants, too, are exquisitely sensitive to factors such as light, moisture and nutrients, as well as predators and pollinators in their environment, and they respond to them in ways that further their growth and propagation; they also communicate with fellow plants, of the same and other species, within their ecological communities. Since plants are sessile (rooted to one place), their behavioral repertoire is necessarily more limited in terms of movement, but they exhibit many sophisticated responses that can rewardingly be studied along the lines of animal behavior, including anticipation of future events, memory, and communication with other organisms (Karban, 2008). They respond individually to the heterogeneity of light and moisture in their environment throughout their growth, not only by placing root and leaf development in the most favorable circumstances, but in ways that have been described as showing ‘choice’; the parasitic dodder plant, for example, actively rejects potential host plants of inferior nutrition by turning its shoot growth at right angles from such stems and elongating directly away from them (Kelly, 1992).”
“It has long been noted that plants respond to leaf-devouring insect attacks by releasing volatile chemicals, a response that not only leads other plants to beef up their own leaf level of insect-repellents but that sometimes draws in specific insect predators and parasitizing wasps (Pare & Tumlinson, 1999). The timing and intensity of release can vary in accordance with a multiplicity of environmental factors, and blends of different odor-producing volatiles can be produced in response to different leaf-eaters, possibly summoning particular carnivorous insects specialized to feast on each kind of herbivore, making it a highly sophisticated response that has been considered, according to a ‘behavioural ecological approach’ that speaks in terms of plant ‘decisions,’ and a ‘crying for help’ within the larger ecological community (Dicke, 2009). It has also been known for several decades now that many forest trees are linked together in underground networks by the mycorrhizal fungi associated with their roots, and they have been shown to send each other nutrients, communicate warning signals, and recognize kin through these networks. According to Suzanne Simard, another scientist who does not hesitate to draw a parallel with the behavior of animals, “the topology of mycorrhizal networks is similar to neural networks, with scale-free patterns and small-world properties that are correlated with local and global efficiencies important in intelligence” (Simard, 2018, p. 191). [4] The communicative properties of trees have also been conveyed to the public by Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016); he speaks of the ‘wood-wide-web’ that connects the trees in a forest, noting that the ‘mother trees,’ the big, old trees that serve as hubs, ‘suckle their young,’ pumping sugars through the network into the roots of young saplings too shaded to survive on their own (Grant, 2018).”
“The similarities between plant and animal behavior and, in some respects, their physiology prompted a group of scientists to announce in 2006 the founding of a new subspecialty, ‘plant neurobiology,’ maintaining that ‘the behavior plants exhibit is coordinated across the whole organism by some form of integrated signaling, communication, and response system,’ one that ‘includes long-distance electrical signals, vesicle-mediated transport of auxin in specialized vascular tissues, and production of chemicals known to be neuronal in animals’ (Brenner et al., 2006). The announcement was met with outrage from a certain quarter of the plant science community, more than thirty luminaries signing onto a letter noting that “there is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses or a brain in plants” (although the ‘plant neurobiologists’ had made no such claims) and challenging the proponents of the new field “to reevaluate critically the concept and to develop an intellectually rigorous foundation for it” (Alpi et al., 2007, p. 136). One of the signatories, Lincoln Taiz, interviewed by Michael Pollan, speaks dismissively of ‘a strain of teleology in plant biology’ and strenuously rejects the notion of ‘choice’ or ‘decision-making’ in plants, explaining that “the plant response is based entirely on the net flow of auxin and other chemical signals,” and maintaining that the verb ‘decide’ is a term that “implies free will.” He amends his stance, however, with the caveat “of course, one could argue that humans lack free will too, but that is a separate issue” (Pollan, 2013). This last statement is rather telling—when one is coming from a reductionist position that flattens down the purposiveness of all life into the bumping about of chemical compounds- one must be sure to keep that belief system ‘separate’ from our understanding of how we actually live our own lives. Whereas, accepting the evolutionary continuity that exists among lifeforms seen as whole organisms lets us recognize the purposiveness, intentional behavior and intelligence that exists throughout living nature—in us and in everything else that’s alive- with no need to make a special exception for ourselves. Pollan observes that “our big brains, and perhaps our experience of inwardness, allow us to feel that we must be fundamentally different—suspended above nature and other species as if by some metaphysical ‘skyhook,’ to borrow a phrase from philosopher Daniel Dennett.” But he notes that “plant neurobiologists are intent on taking away our skyhook, completing the revolution that Darwin started but which remains—psychologically at least—incomplete” (Pollan, 2013, n.p.).
Monica Gagliano is another scientist who has already made the paradigm shift; unapologetic about speaking of learning, memory, and intelligence in plants (Gagliano et al., 2016). She is at the same time, critical of “those who make the big claims and write grand opinion pieces,” saying “we don’t need another opinion piece”—“we need to do the science.” Having started as an animal ecologist, she prefers to call her field ‘plant cognitive ethology,’ maintaining that, “for me, a plant isn’t an object, it’s always a subject that is interacting with other subjects in the environment” (Morris, 2018, n.p.). [5] Unlike plants, however, animals typically move rapidly around in their environments and so must have a way of coordinating their movements rapidly—hence the emergence of the nervous system. Simple animals like sponges rely on cell-to-cell signaling, and radially symmetric animals like jellyfish make do with diffuse nerve nets, but the bilaterians generally coordinate their movements via well-developed nervous systems that are believed to have originated in a last common ancestor arising over 500 million years ago. The basic structure is a linear nerve cord with ‘ganglion’ enlargements supplying each body segment, and a larger ‘brain’ at the front end; in invertebrates, including many worms, crustaceans, and insects, the nerve cord is divided in two and placed ventrally, below the major organs of the body, while in vertebrates it is dorsally located and encased in a bony vertebral column. The insect brain is made up of three regions, the protocerebrum, deuterocerebrum, and tritocerebrum. The largest region is the protocerebrum that houses the mushroom bodies, paired neuron clusters making up the ‘higher’ brain centers, thought to be important in learning, memory, and behavioral complexity, especially in bees, wasps and ants; it is estimated that the mushroom bodies contain about 340,000 neurons in the honeybee. An example of complex cognitive behavior in insects is the ‘waggle dance’ of honeybees, which communicates information to hive mates about the direction and distance to sources of nectar and pollen. [6] Faced with the striking degree of organizational similarity among living animal forms, one scientist recently summarized, “as our knowledge of neural development increases, so does the list of conserved features, pointing to the existence of a highly sophisticated, single species as the origin of most extant nervous systems” (Ghysen, 2003, p. 555). The vast majority of animal forms utilize the sensory information they take in from their environment in order to move in appropriate, survival-related ways. Hence they will have a great variety of perceptual abilities, forms of cognitive processing, and behavioral responses shaped by the different ecological niches they inhabit, something that we tend to take for granted but should recognize as a distinctive feature of animal life that extends far beyond the boundaries of our own species. Development of the human brain follows the same basic trajectory as that of all mammalian brains, the neural tube expanding into hindbrain, midbrain and forebrain regions, with the latter giving rise to an expanded cerebral cortex. Some other mammals also manifest a high degree of cortical development, including the other great apes, elephants, and cetaceans such as the bottle-nosed dolphin. To put our own brain power in perspective, we will look at what we now know about the brains of some other animals, bearing in mind that we are learning more all the time as careful investigations are carried out utilizing new technologies and with an open-minded attitude to what we may find.”
“The brain of the false killer whale, at almost 4,000 g, is more than twice the size of the human brain, at roughly 1,500 g, while the brain of the African elephant is almost three times larger, at four to 5,000 g, and the brain of the sperm whale, the largest of the mammals, is almost six times larger, at around 8,000 g. The cortical surfaces of the brains of the two cetaceans are also more highly convoluted, cetaceans showing the greatest degree of convolution among the mammals. Earlier comparisons have focused on the ratio of brain to body size, the ‘encephalization quotient,’ but this appears a rather crude measurement in light of a newly developed technology allowing for a quantitative assessment of the number of neurons and non-neuronal cells in different regions of the brain and in total, opening up insights into a greater degree of diversity in brain architecture than heretofore appreciated (Herculano-Houzel, 2009). Using this technology, it has been discovered that the different orders of mammals have different ‘cellular scaling rules’ determining the density of neurons present per gram of brain tissue. Larger brains in rodents, for example, will contain larger total numbers of neurons than will smaller rodent brains, but the brains of primates ‘scale in a much more space-saving, economical manner,’ such that neuron density is greater, and so increasing brain size in primates results in an even greater number of neurons, gram for gram, than would be found in rodents. By this measure, humans, with the largest brains among the primates, do have the greatest number of brain cells—in a 1.5 kg brain, 86 billion neurons and 85 billion non-neuronal cells have been found—but only when compared with the other, smaller-brained primates. [7] According to the author of these studies, “we need to rethink our notions about the place that the human brain holds in nature and evolution, and rewrite some of the basic concepts that are taught in textbooks” (Herculano-Houzel, 2009, pp. 9-10). Ours is not qualitatively different from other primate brains, but simply has the number of neurons expected for its size; it is basically just ‘a linearly scaled-up primate brain.’ Moreover, our cerebral cortex, which makes up 82% of our brain mass at an average of 1,233 g (out of an average 1,500 g brain), holds only 16 billion neurons (19% of the total in the brain), a fraction similar to that seen in other primates and some other mammals. While the cerebellum—a part of the brain until recently considered solely devoted to movement coordination, but now becoming the focus of increasing interest as its complex interconnections with the cerebral cortex are explored—weighs only 154 g but contains 69 billion neurons (Herculano-Houzel, 2009). The new research not only gives us a new perspective on our own brains, and thereby our ‘cognitive’ place in nature, it is beginning to change our views of other animals, what they are really like and what they might be capable of, cognitively. The brain of the African elephant is not only roughly three times larger than our own, it contains roughly three times as many neurons—257 billion of them as calculated in the pioneering study (Herculano-Houzel, 2014). The vast majority of them, however—251 billion, or 97.5%—are found in the cerebellum, with only 5.6 billion in the cerebral cortex—and the neurons that are found there are thought to be an average of 10 to 40 times larger than those found in other mammals, with what this might mean for cognition being currently unknown. The size of the elephant cerebellum, which makes up more than 25% of the total brain mass, the largest proportionally of all mammals, has been speculated to be related to infrasound communication or possibly to processing the complex sensory and motor requirements involved in the sensitive, manipulatory use of the trunk—but much remains to be discovered about this fascinating animal.”
“The numbers and distributions of neurons in the brains of cetaceans are yet to be determined—one estimate was 11 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex of the false killer whale, but this could be off by a factor of ten, giving an estimate of between 21 billion and 212 billion for the whole brain, depending on the scaling rules for the order, as yet undetermined (Herculano-Houzel, 2009). One thing that is known is that the architecture of cetacean brains is even more divergent from the typical mammalian plan than that of elephants. While their brains are the most highly convoluted among the mammals, their cerebral cortex is comparatively thin and appears to lack one of the usual six layers of cells. Moreover, instead of an expansion of the frontal lobes, as observed in primates, there has been an expansion toward the sides, in the temporal and parietal regions, and there is a completely new lobe, the paralimbic lobe, not found in any other mammal, the function of which is so far unknown (Marino, 2002) but possibly may be related to echolocation or coordination of synchronous movements in groups of animals. The pattern of projection of visual and auditory information onto the cerebral cortex is also highly unusual among mammals, as is the marked degree of independence between the two cerebral hemispheres, which reportedly sleep independently of one another, and seem to be altogether lacking in REM sleep.”
“The brains of birds, too, have recently been found to be more remarkable than once believed. Birds have a pallium instead of the neocortex found in mammals; the surface of their brains is smooth rather than convoluted, and the cells in their cerebrum are arranged in nuclear clusters instead of layers. It has recently been discovered, however, that their neurons are even more tightly packed than in the brains of primates, with parrots and songbirds having about twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass, and their brains are truly ‘miniaturized,’ since the short distance between neurons necessitated by their high densities likely results in a higher speed of information processing (Olkowicz et al., 2016). Parrots, like primates, show an increased connectivity between the telencephalon and the cerebellum, possibly indicative of an interplay between fine motor skills and complex cognition in birds (Gutierrez-Ibanez et al., 2018), along the lines of what is being investigated in mammals. What is being learned about the brains of birds, moreover, is spurring a new look at the brains of reptiles and even fish. The mobulid rays, a group of cartilaginous fishes comprising the manta and devil rays, have high encephalization quotients, a relatively large telencephalon making up over 60% of the brain mass, and a high degree of cerebellar foliation thought to be due to their active, maneuverable lifestyles and highly developed social and migratory behavior (Ari, 2011). A study of selected genes from mammalian neocortex and homologous genes from avian and turtle brains found, once again, a ‘highly conserved’ pattern of gene expression, supporting the conclusion that many of the cell types, neurotransmitters, and circuitry are widely shared among the vertebrates, preserving the major connections and performing very similar functions despite major differences in brain structure and tissue architecture, attesting to fundamental continuity since the last common ancestor, over 500 million years ago.”
“Among the ‘brainier’ members of the mammalian and avian classes—particularly the primates, elephants, whales and dolphins, parrots, corvids and some other songbirds, and even the mobulid rays (Ari & D’Agostino, 2016)—we are finding many, many examples of ‘higher cognition.’ Over the last five to 10 years or so, there has been a veritable explosion of research reports, popular articles and books detailing what’s being discovered about their abilities, and it is now widely accepted that some of these animals engage in tool use, mirror self-recognition, imitation, vocal learning, and complex social cognition likely including ‘theory of mind,’ to name a few indicators. Frans deWaal discusses the cognitive abilities of some of these other animals, from apes and monkeys to crows and parrots, elephants and octopuses, and even ants, wasps and bees, raising deep questions about our common assumption: that humans are the only living beings capable of intelligent thought (and that only the human kind of thought should be considered ‘intelligent’), an attitude that, because it is exclusively ‘centered upon the human,’ is termed anthropocentrism. [8]”
“One way to see how our thinking has changed can be illustrated by consideration of what we have been learning about birds, both in terms of behavior and in brain structure. As discussed by Ackerman (2016), birds have now been extensively documented to have complex cognitive abilities, including memory and spatial mapping (Clark’s nutcrackers can bury and retrieve pine seeds from up to 5,000 caches spread over hundreds of square miles), tool use (New Caledonian crows fashion elaborate tools from branches and bend wires into hooks for obtaining food), vocal learning (mockingbirds can imitate, with near perfection, as many as two hundred different songs of other birds), social learning (a few great tits learned to open milk bottles in a single town in the 1920s and the behavior spread widely over Britain over subsequent decades; crows can recognize individual humans and spread information about the ‘dangerous’ scientists who capture them across large social networks), mirror self-recognition (Eurasian magpies will scratch away a mark put on their throat when seen in a mirror), and complex social interaction, manipulation, and possibly ‘theory of mind’ (western scrub jays keep track of other birds that might be watching them when they cache their food, and will recache it later if necessary; male Eurasian jays seem to understand their mates’ specific desires for certain foods). But until recently, little effort was put into making such observations, since until very recently we had little respect for ‘bird brains.’”
“The lines giving rise to the primates, elephants, and cetaceans probably diverged over 95 million years ago, with independent evolution occurring in these lines ever since, so it is not surprising that differences are to be found in the overall structure of their brains. The split between what became mammals and birds came even earlier, sometime around 300 million years ago. Nevertheless, parrots and primates “show impressive convergence of complex cognitive abilities, and this is accompanied by convergent changes in the brain,” including relatively large brain size, telencephalon size, size of associative areas of the telencephalon, and increased connectivity between the telencephalon and cerebellum- though this increased connectivity has evolved over different neural pathways (Gutierrez-Ibanez et al., 2018, p. 5). “It has been suggested that intelligence in these taxa can only have arisen by convergent evolution,” observes cognitive biologist Nathan Emery:
driven by the need to solve comparable social and ecological problems; simple examination of six ecological variables across corvids, parrots, other birds, monkeys, apes, elephants and cetaceans reveals that certain preconditions correlate with the development of complex cognition: omnivorous generalist diet, highly social, large relative brain size, innovative, long developmental period, extended longevity, and variable habitat, [and] this exercise suggests that the evolution of intelligence was highly correlated with the ability to think and act flexibly within an ever-changing environment. (Emery, 2005, p. 37)”
“The same can be said about the conditions under which our own Species evolved, of course, placing us within the spectrum of cognitively complex animals, one with a very high degree of behavioral flexibility indeed.”
https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Political_Science_and_Civics/Human_Security_in_World_Affairs_-_Problems_and_Opportunities_2e_(Lautensach_and_Lautensach)/11%3A_Our_War_Against_Nature_-_Ontology_Cognition_and_a_Constricting_Paradigm/11.3%3A_Seeing_the_Complexity_of_Nature
