116 REAL GENES, REAL INTELLIGENCEHans Westerhoff and colleagues go even further, suggesting that “mac-
romolecular networks in microbes confer intelligent characteristics, such
as memory, anticipation, adaptation and refl ection.” All forms of life,
from microbes to humans, “exhibit some or all characteristics consistent
with ‘intelligence.’ ”^8 And Frank Bruggerman and co- authors report the
discovery of signal integration cir cuits that “enable the bacterium to
‘compute’ the optimal physiological response by evaluating its current
internal physiological status and the external environmental status.”
Instead of genes merely producing biochemicals, they say, “Evolution
has led to highly sophisticated and quasi- intelligent regulation of that
biochemistry.”^9
Today’s molecular biologists are increasingly reporting “intelligence”
in bacteria, “cognitive resources” in single cells, “bio- information intelli-
gence,” “cell intelligence,” “metabolic memory,” and “cell knowledge”— all
terms appearing in recent lit er a ture. “Do Cells Th ink?” is the title of a
paper by Sharad Ramanathan and James Broach in the journal Cellular
and Molecular Life Sciences. And Philip Ball, aft er a group in Japan had
reported a slime mold solving a maze to reach food, informed Nature
readers that “learning and memory— abilities associated with a brain or,
at the very least, neuronal activity— have been observed in protoplasmic
slime, a unicellular organism.”^10
Th ese pro cesses, at the roots of intelligent systems, have been called
epige ne tic, meaning above or beyond the genes. It has been tempting to
suggest that they simply regulate or modulate the real information (i.e.,
the true potentials of living things) in the genes. But the truth is, such infor-
mation never existed there. Th is is a hard message for people to swal-
low, even those who are trying to rewrite our understanding of genes.
In her book, Th e Epigenet ics Revolution, Nessa Carey is worried that
“the fi eld is in danger of swinging too far in the opposite direction, with
hardline epige ne ticists almost minimizing the signifi cance of the DNA
code. Th e truth is, of course, somewhere in between.”^11
To describe further the real truth, let us look more closely at how bio-
logical systems manage to be so intelligent. What follows is a little more
of the technical detail of intelligent pro cesses in the reaction of a single
cell to the environment ( either as a single unicellular organism, such as a
bacterium, or in a multicellular plant or animal). I want to illustrate how,
through the diff er ent stages, the intelligent pro cesses of the cell more
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