Sean, how dare you,sir! You have pinched my line. And the Speaker affair?
Seriously chemotaxis is not memory as attributed to higher (?) sentient animals. Is it not simply a basic cellular process of seek and avoid, an adaptation of detecting concentration gradients in media? DItto following its slime track? Do snails and molluscs act similarly or are they just smoothing the road ahead/under foot?

Chemotaxis is a wholly inadequate explanation for the way that so called lower animals learn, make choices, and learn again. Amazing how these and other neo-Darwinian myths have stuck to our memories as unquestionable truths.

If they can remember and learn what they remembered and then make separate choices based on what they've newly learned, then they are using at least a minimum of problem solving intelligence. in fact any creature that communicates with other creatures is using intelligence - communication must serve an intelligent purpose. And as it's turning out, all known living creatures communicate in some fashion.
As to squid and cuttlefish, they've learned and evolved such learning over time to be as deceptive a creature as we know to exist. They've evolved their strategies and their extra-chameleon like forms to boot. Except chameleons can't hold a candle to some of these cephalopods.

Still, I'm with Peter O on the intelligence side. There presumably is a distinction between instinctive actions, even if this includes communication, and the more reflective processes we associate with intelligence.

On a slightly different angle, I was rather blown away by some of the concepts in Bruce Lipton's book "The Biology of Belief", and in particular his assertion that it is in the cell membranes that we find the smarts and NOT the nucleus with all the DNA encoding. I lack the depth of scientific background to be able to fully appraise his work, and find myself somewhat skeptical at times regarding what he presents. But at the same time there were aspects of the controls exercised by the cell membranes that made sense. AND seem to align with the findings of Chris and his colleagues where these amazing unicellular colonies are responding to their environments - with the cell membranes being pivotal in that perception.

I'm also reminded of a Radio National Science Show, maybe a year ago, where Slime Moulds were centre stage. These amazing colonies responded to a chronic food shortage by forming some sort of communal structure that meant that the top members got to be pivoted into a new environment while the rest of the colony would be left behind and die. Pretty amazing as a process/response to the environment by "dumb" unicellular life!

Well, I just think it should be renamed the Hanzel and Gretel MOULD.

So much for my theories that intelligence evolves.

The advantage of a broad education is usually that you do not have to hit people over the head with your opinion. In this case, children's literature which survives for thousands of years because it transmits profound truths works. This creature simply recognizes the cue it left behind and then avoids that area just as the kids from the fairytale used cues to ensure that they could find their way home in a daunting situation. Even so, the crumbs disappeared and it was clear that they did not actually know the way- getting them into profound danger. I would love to repeat this experiment with the identical maze which was new, unslimed to see if they could actually solve it in the same time, greater time or lessor time.
Perhaps that is why no one was willing to read your book, sir, for we usually take the time to read what might add something to our thinking.

You've only demonstrated that if the slime acted like children, the slime were at least minimally intelligent. People actually do read my book, just not people like yourself. Although I mentioned it in the negative, I agree that I shouldn't have done so at all.

So are you suggesting that when plants follow the sunshine, they are demonstrating intelligence, Roy?

If I may butt in, Debra, firstly please allow me a change in terminology.

The word "intelligence" with its many and varied shades of meaning, is the greatest contributer to the woolly-mindedness which plagues discussions of this kind. " Imagination", the ability to form, store and morph models of the external world within the neural systems of higher animals and to a lesser extent in simpler species gives us a far better handle on this feature.

Imagination can usefully be considered to be a memory-enhanced version of its more primitive correlate, consciousness (self awareness).

Which brings us the issue of the plant following the sun or, say, bacterial chemotaxis.

While, at least to the extent that awareness of the self of these organisms represents the locus of its inputs and outputs, we must allow, at least in principle, a basic consciousness.

However, in general, plants do not have the memory attributes that characterize imagination. They do not exhibit learned behavior.
That is not to say that they are completely devoid of memory. That is certainly not the case because some is required, for instance for the implementation of phototaxis. But it is memory that is "hard-wired".
Innate memory provided by evolutionary processes. Somewhat analogous to the BIOS that is provided in your computer to pull itself up by its bootstraps and become ready to "learn"

Within the animal kingdom, of course, imagination is ubiquitous.
A prerequisite for survival and replication.

For a snail it is tiny, for a rat, very appreciable.

For the human species, whose level of interaction with its environment is extraordinarily high, it is immense. Importantly, human imagination is not limited to the individual, as is largely the case in other creatures.

Human imagination is greatly amplified by virtue of the fact that it is exported and imported between individuals. It is also stored externally on such media as paper, more recently, magnetic, optical and electronic devices.

This collective sharing and storing of imagination is what we call "language".

We would do well to discard the overused, vague and silly word "intelligence". Imagination, essentially a navigational feature, says it all.

Thank you Peter. I agree in that I think the major difficulty that we see in the meeting of minds in this discussion is one primarily of definition.

I do not think plants demonstrate intelligence per se. I also do not see this experiment as evidence of memory. Additionally, as i term imagination and even higher form of cognition than memory, I cannot use that term either. (If we look at where imagination is thought to arise in the brain- it is in a very high order segment that evolved quite late in the process).

I am not exactly disagreeing with the contributors as much as using my own slime mould technique of saying to myself- been there and I am pretty sure that is not it!

Debra, I think you are still stymied by this silly term "intelligence" with its huge sliding scale of connotations, many of them emotive and most of them anthropocentric.

Now, let me ask you why you would not agree that the following definition of "imagination" does not fit. To simplify, for now, we'll say just in the case of humans.

"The ability to form, store and morph models of the external world within the CNS"

Can you think of any exceptions?

Hi Peter, thank you for this thoughtful dialogue. In answer, the greatest respect I know how to show you is to say that I have to think about this. I might be simply stymied by vocabulary or perhaps it is my neuroscience courses and thus just indoctrination but my strong sense or normal usage of imagination is just not the same as what you propose. I will, however, really seriously think about this. Thanks again.

Why assume that memory is externalized when it's not apparently contained in an internal brain? Humans have memory systems "outside" of their brains all over the place, including in virtually every cell. All of our cultures perform as memory systems. Slime molds communicate to teach each cell accordingly, using the equivalent of cultural memory. This was a nice experiment, but should not have been surprising, when similar results have been obtained by experimenting with microbial forms for years.

Memories that are recalled are stored in specific neural apparati, such as the hippocampus etc.
For example, when you recall a telephone number it is neural tissue that is involved.

It may be rude to state this personal comment, which has nothing to do with the topic, but the name Joe Gartner brings to mind an extremely nice person, an agricultural scientist, a great tennis player and a collegiate of mine in the later 1950s.
john nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com
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Don't know the book Roy? Maybe you could put it up as a *.pdf? As for you considering it mechanistic I'm not sure? Somehow the organism needs to evolve to that state where it can communicate with its environment by the slime. Maybe there is a elegant algorithm hiding somewhere there?

Hey, unfair, I didn't tout my book to explain my theories!

If your book is free and a sensible extension of the of the topic then why not do readers of these comments the courtesy of mentioning it.

If, of course, your own effort is purely a commercial venture then you would more reasonably be classified as a tout.

So I claim my mention very fair.

I also refrain from ad hominem comment

Ooooh. I suppose if mine won't sell either, I'll start giving it away as well. But I don't need a book to explain what I can do just as well in a short commentary here. It's always bothered me when people use these forums to tout books, even though when one actually writes one, I'll admit they're tempted to.

Peter Kinon, I thought imagination had to do with the development of ideas and "maps" if you like of speculative spatial forms, which did not previously exist. Memory of spatial data, on the other hand seems to me to be the recall of something one has seen, a real object or region, which is not part of the imagination but something already in existence.

I am not saying that what you have said is wrong. I am merely explaining that my concept of the matter appears to be different from yours and I would be interested if you could take your comments a step further perhaps.

If your book can be represented in a short commentary, Roy, you can't really expect folk to part up with their hard-earned to acquire a volume which says nothing more.

Judging by your on-topic comments here, though, I doubt if this is actually the case and you may well have something useful to say that extends beyond the constraints of a blog.

So, for your first book, at least, make it a free download and let it all hang out!