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From: john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:16:48 -0700
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On Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:14:51 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

>On Thu, 10 Jul 2025 11:04:32 -0700, john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:38:41 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>I forgot to mention that he Sciences of the Artificial digs deep into
>>>why living things (even microscopic ones) have distinct organs and
>>>often components within such organs, versus the organism being a mass
>>>of tissue that somehow does everything.  The driver is efficiency and
>>>simplicity.
>>>
>>>This assumes that life has already emerged in some unspecified way,
>>>and goes from there.  This is a different approach than Dawkin's
>>>Blind-Watchmaker arguments.
>>>
>>>Joe
>>>
>>>
>>>Ref:  "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The
>>>Architecture of Complexity.  New copies are available from MIT Press.
>>
>>Even single-cell critters have levels of intelligence. Some people
>>suggest some level of consciousness.
>
>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. 
>

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.