Are microbes intelligent & creative?
We’re witnessing a tremendous amount of advancement in building Intelligence and creativity into machines through data and algorithms. However, the foundational question of what does it mean to be intelligent and creative still remains a fascinating intellectual question. Anutthaman and I took a weekend hike recently and pondered this question from a microbiology perspective. Here is the summary of our conversation.
Q: Do you think creativity or intelligence exists in biology, in simpler forms such as bacteria? If so, what form would this take?
A: Yes. It depends on how you define creativity or intelligence. If you think of intelligence as problem-solving, novel functions or adaptation to external factors, then we are talking about a rudimentary form of intelligence.
Not only bacteria, fungi and parasites like malaria but also viruses may be considered “intelligent”. Assuming one of these or a virus infects another creature far more complex, say a human- it must first sense the victim/host, invade it, fight its immune system and persist. It may get killed of course, since the immune system is evolving to tackle, digest and remember invaders. But many times even the simplest form such as a virus (which bridges the living and nonliving worlds because it can propagate only inside living systems) is often more than a match for the human’s big complex brain and all of the human technology. And it changes via random statistical processes manifested by mutations. But this is not all predetermined, they can respond to the human’s immune defences and evade human technology in real-time.
Q: Can you elaborate on the random processes? How is this different from materials such as crystals propagating themselves?
A: This is a sort of collective intelligence, based on a biased statistical process of mutations involving billions of microscopic single-celled creatures or viruses (not all of the astronomical number of possibilities are useful to evade immunity or escape the effects of technology). For a particular set of circumstances, there are a few optimal solutions (mutations) represented by each variant of a microbe or virus, and under these conditions, these will propagate themselves (and the other variants have a higher chance of being eliminated). This “intelligence” or “creativity” in terms of an evolved response separates biological systems from inanimate things like crystals which can also propagate themselves. The biochemical warfare between a pathogenic cell and a host often involves cooperation between different invading cells of the same type.
Q: Ok, other than the responses based on mutations you talked about, are there other ways a microbe may show “intelligence”?
A: For example, bacteria can modify their behaviour based on a quorum (a certain threshold number), beyond which chemical signals will be secreted and modify the behaviour of the entire group. Isn’t that a type of counting, very basic mathematical intelligence? And that controls a change in biological responses as well. In addition, bacteria in your intestines can directly influence your brains such as giving you depression or a sugar craving. That’s the power of chemistry. Who’s cleverer in that case, bacteria or human?
Q: Do other creatures show such “collective intelligence” and what do they do with it?
A: If you discount the larger animals which include humans, there are still other examples of such “emergent intelligence”, which is collective based on a simple brain for each individual creature. Social insects like bees, wasps, termites and ants can build cities for millions of inhabitants (hives or hills), do agriculture (cultivate fungi and plants), manage “livestock” (keep aphids for getting sugar from their back ends), make materials that didn’t exist before (beeswax, paper), maintain armies and construct air-conditioning, all using their collective intelligence mediated by chemical cues and tiny brains proportional to their body sizes. In fact, the evolution of collective intelligence may contain clues to how more complex brains evolve and work.
Q: Do you think that a classification of intelligence can be thought of ?
A: Yes. In ancient India, each sensory perception type (sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing) plus conscious thought or intuition was considered a level of “intelligence”. So, there were expressions like “1-sense creature”, “5-sense” creature and of humans as “6-sense” or “7-sense” beings. What one could also argue based on the ideas of Buddhism is that the more complex a creature’s senses and suffering, the more intelligent it is. Therefore, a worm’s suffering (and intelligence) is lower than that of a dog. At some level, this also comes from the social ties an animal usually has, so the more socially complex ones are considered more intelligent. Much more recently in the West, people considered different brain areas as representing levels of intelligence — the brain stem controlling automatic functions is level 1, the old “reptilian” parts with emotions level 2, the monkey or ape brain is level 3, and the prefrontal cortex of humans responsible for conscious thought is level 4.
One can also look at human activity based categories of intelligence such as mathematical, spatial/body awareness/sports-related, artistic/ musical, analytical, linguistic or interpersonal intelligence. So you see, it depends on how you define intelligence in the first place
