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This doesn't feel as shocking or startling to me as it probably does for many. A slime mold is a collection of adjacent cells without a hierarchy that can act
by szhu 6y ago
This doesn't feel as shocking or startling to me as it probably does for many.
A slime mold is a collection of adjacent cells without a hierarchy that can act together to make decisions. Our brain is also a collection of adjacent cells that can act together to make decisions.
They're fundamentally the same thing. It seems like people are shocked primarily because we arbitrarily defined a notion of certain collections of cells being an "organism", and a slime mold doesn't fit within this ontology.
- dangerbird2 6y agoWhen slime molds are in the plasmodial life stage (when they become macroscopic and "smart" according to the paper), it is not a collection of cells, but a single cytoplasm sharing multiple nuclei, making it a technically single-celled organism. Of course, because it contains so many nuclei over such a large area, it ends up behaving like a multicellular colonial organism.