This Brainless, Single-Celled Blob Can Make Complex 'Decisions'
Tiny, brainless blobs might be able to make decisions: A single-celled organism can "change its mind" to avoid going near an irritating substance, according to new findings.
Over a century ago, American zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings conducted an experiment on a relatively large, trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism called Stentor roeselii. When Jennings released an irritating carmine powder around the organisms, he observed that they responded in a predictable pattern, he wrote in his findings, which he published in a text called "Behavior of the Lower Organisms" in 1906.
[...] In the decades that followed, however, other experiments failed to replicate these findings, and so they were discredited. But recently, a group of researchers at Harvard University decided to re-create the old experiment as a side project. "It was a completely off-the-books, skunkworks project," senior author Jeremy Gunawardena, a systems biologist at Harvard, said in a statement. "It wasn't anyone's day job."
[...] "They do the simple things first, but if you keep stimulating, they 'decide' to try something else," Gunawardena said. "S. roeselii has no brain, but there seems to be some mechanism that, in effect, lets it 'change its mind' once it feels like the irritation has gone on too long."
A Complex Hierarchy of Avoidance Behaviors in a Single-Cell Eukaryote (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.059) (DX)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @11:31PM (5 children)
We already knew Republicans can vote.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Bot on Sunday December 08 2019, @12:11AM (1 child)
Yes, we know we are talking only about reps because the organism changes idea, a behavior never shown by lefties.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:25AM
Self aware wolf material right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:37AM
Multiple times.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:47AM (1 child)
Voting party line doesn't require decision making.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:05PM
Oddly enough this characteristic is disproportionately driven by democrats. Homogeneity in views is all but disappearing. See, for instance, views that are ostensibly fundamental like abortion [pewforum.org] or gun control [pewresearch.org]. You'll find "group think" among democratic voters, yet views among non-democratic voters are much more nuanced and diverse. 'Non-democratic' voters is not a euphemism for republican. There is also a healthy amount of diversity and heterogeneity among independents, libertarians, greens, etc. The homogeneity among views applies primarily to democrats. They are becoming the party of 'look at how diverse our skin colors and sexual fetishes are' while having near 0 diversity, and one might cynically suggest - independence, of actual thought.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:37AM (3 children)
OK, it's a catastrophic (in the mathematical sense - probably either a fold or a cusp) reaction, but there are plenty of those in biochemistry.
My LED lightbulb just "decided" to explode. Beat that, biochemistry!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:39AM
a transistor
a bimetalic strip thermostat
Do they make a "decision" to "change behaviour" when the input stimulus reaches a certain level?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:16PM
This would be more like if you hit your light each time it turned on, yet your wife pet it. And so it stopped turning on for you, yet kept turning on for your wife. In other words it's not a simple "impartial" physical process, it's a biased 'cognitive' process. But it should be impossible for a single celled organism to have cognitive processes, hence - news.
In my opinion, we think we know vastly more about human psychology than we do. I will appeal to a single piece of evidence - the very newly discovered and still completely mysterious connection between the gut biome and brain/cognitive function. The place we once attributed little more relevance to than a food processor seems to have an intricate connection to our own cognitive state. Quite fun implications if you consider things such as us completely butchering (unfortunately, figuratively speaking) the things we put in our stomach in the US, the absurdo-exponential spike in mental illness, substantial declines in average IQ beyond dysgenic factors, massive spikes in obesity, so forth and so on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @07:06AM
There are single celled creatures that have better foresight than some humans over whether to reproduce or not. They build shells for themselves and if there aren't enough shell material to reproduce they don't reproduce, and if after a while they discover that there's enough they go back to reproducing again:
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/1390351#page/153/mode/1up [biodiversitylibrary.org]
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/1390351#page/154/mode/1up [biodiversitylibrary.org]
So maybe most humans don't think and are just reacting to stimuli? ;)
Note that some of these single celled creatures build elaborate AND fairly distinctive shells (you can tell the difference between the species from the shells). https://www.arcella.nl/lobose-testate-amoebae/ [arcella.nl]
Some generate the "pieces" for their shell material ( idiosomic ) and others get them from the environment ( xenosomic ).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:52AM
Torturing dumb animals is wrong, whether it is a Stentor in a lab or a muslim in Guantanamo.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:13AM
Eth can make decisions, right? On the other hand, perhaps it is just the knee-jerk reactions of a racist idiot, no thinking required.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:55PM
So can a logic gate.