The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology

Of course it is. Dawkins is a biologists and Simon Herbert is a professor of computer science.

Dawkins wants to know how something evolved. Herbert wants to know how something that exists and survives happens to work.

Both have an interest in the fine detail of the processes that keep organisms alive, but Dawkin wants to know how the processes have changed as the organism have evolved, while Herbert is primarily interested in how they work now

Despite being published by the MIT Press, Herbert is at Carnegie-Mellon. This shouldn't come as a surprise. MIT press also published my wife's textbook, even though she was only at MIT briefly in the 1970s as a post-doc.

Even single-cell critters have levels of intelligence. Some people suggest some level of consciousness.

The book sounds cool.

Dawkin says he is an atheist above anything else. So he naturally hides from anything that's not primitive neo-Darwinism.

I would not go quite that far. Resembles ancient paganism and pantheism, where behind every rock and plant there is a god of some sort.

It is. It was and to some degree still is very influential thirty years later.

Yes. Dawkins may have drawn on The Sciences of the Artificial, but they differ. Don't recall if he cites it.

Joe

But rocks don't have DNA.

Plants turn out to be pretty intelligent. A really good book is Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

I'd really like to see the fiberoptic-like fungi network seriously instrumented.

Sure they do, from everything near. But a god is better, but it was getting crowded.

I know of that book, but from a book review if I recall. Made perfect sense. There is all kinds of horse trading going on between species, no matter the size or kind.

What I always tell people is that if you can see a critter, it's not actually important, being far outweighed by all the microscopic stuff.

I recall seeing that. There is a kind of clam that has calcite fibers embedded in its shell, and so has a crude form of vision even when closed tight.

Joe

Actually, he is a biologist above everything else. Creationists - proponents of "intelligent design" - pretend to have all sort of ides about how living beings are more complicated than Darwinian evolution requires, but it is all nonsense.

That's just moving the goal posts. One gets people nowadays talking about different people's gut biomes 'communicating' with each other. If all they mean is that there's some poorly-qnantified mauual influence, okay, but I get the impression they often mean more than that.

I think it's unhelpful to conflate mere mutual influence with intelligence---even calling it "information exchange" imports the idea of meaning, which requires actual intelligence.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The charm of fibre-optics is that they move information at the speed of light. Fungi networks don't seem to be even as fast as human nerve cells.

There are probably biologists who have instrumented a fungal network in a forest somewhere. Nothing elaborate or expensive - those networks are big - so they'd confine themselves to sparse sampling. I've no idea what chemicals they'd be sampling for - when I did first year biology back in 1960, chemical signalling wasn't covered.

The most likely reason we haven't heard about is that the results are tedious and unsurprising.

Even single-cell critters (including our own cells) have extraordinarily complex behavior. And nobody understands how our brains work.

What I'm suggesting is that we not exclude thinking about possible biological mechanisms for theological reasons.

What's your definition of "actual intelligence" ? I know that most of what I do (and invent) is done unconsiously.

Is an oyster intelligent?

An intelligent being, properly speaking, is one with a *nous*.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

He's decided "transgenderism" is the New Religion and gone off into JK Rowling la la land.

Maybe him and Morrissey can start a shoegaze band together they seem to have a lot in common

But we are working on it. And "large language models" produce a pretty coherent approximation to real speech, though nobody can spell out exactly why.

Nobody sane does. Creationists - the "intelligent design" crew - want added extra mystery so they can import god via the back door.

But people who do it better than you do think harder about what they give their sub-conscious processing to chew on.

Intelligence is one of those things that is hard to define, but tolerably easy to recognise, rather like beauty.

Barely. But Donald Trump is quite intelligent, but not intelligent enough to acquire all the background knowledge he needs to make sound decisions. Imposing tariffs on the non-existent exports from Heard Island - which is only inhabited by penguins and seals - wasn't all that clever.

I blame comp sci/software marketing who've has been calling anything more sophisticated than a bubble sort an "intelligent algorithm" for like 40 years.

Stuff like Bayesian inference and A* search should be in a data structures and algorithms course but they put it in the "Artificial Intelligence" course cuz when you put course titles with the word "algorithms" in it students are like "s*it the homework's just going to be a lot of irritating Big Oh runtime analysis questions", it unearths past trauma, and they're not signing up for that.

Yes, but what does it matter? They seem to be doing well enough.

It doesn't take much to cause significant evolution. It was recently figured out why Baltic Cod are so small these days, compared to the two-foot length common a few decades ago.

"Genomic evidence for fisheries-induced evolution in Eastern Baltic cod", Science Advances, 25 June 2025.

.

Turns out that the culprit is hungry people.

Joe

They are very fragile, barely glued to the back of the eyeball. I have personal experiences with that.

I wonder why they evolved that way.

Well, it persists because it doesn't become a problem until well after people have had their children.

Joe

There's a word I haven't heard used in North America but it's certainly used in the UK.

They use it wrong over there too. ;)

The nous is the mind, but not primarily the discursive reason (dianoia).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Better cooling is thought to be why humans have hair on top (to block solar heat and UV from cooking the tip), but no fur.

Ancient Egyptians all wore wigs, probably to block the Sun even better. Noontime Egyptian sunlight is brutal.

Aside from that, the higher the eye is off the ground, the farther one can see; this is useful in grassland plains with prowling predators.

Ours can as well, at the sensor molecule level. But we don't perceive scattered single photons as there are lots of self-noise processes that generate what appears to be light. And there is always shot noise. So the minimum is two photons that are close in both time and space. This optimizes the SNR.

Joe