Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
icated bacterial language allows for such tight coordination amongst different species in
microbial colonies that they are best described as multicellular superorganisms. As in
human language, the meaning of a given bacterial signal depends entirely on context, so
that the same molecule will trigger a whole range of responses depending on what is go-
ing on both within and outside an individual cell. One key researcher in this field speaks
of bacteria leading “rich social lives”, of developing “collective memory” and “common
knowledge”, of having “group identity”, of being able to “recognise the identity of other
colonies”, of “learning from experience”, of “improving themselves” and of engaging in
“group decision making”, all of which add up to a social intelligence analogous to that
of “primates, birds and insects”.
What all of this amounts to is that we can no longer think of bacteria as nothing more
than mere chemical mechanisms. Maturana and Varela hold that cognition is an indissol-
uble aspect of the self-making (autopoietic) quality of the living state, and since bacteria
are undoubtedly autopoietic, their responsiveness to their inner environment and to the
world around them are clear manifestations of a uniquely bacterial style of cognition.
Bacteria are deeply sentient creatures that live in a rich, meaningful communal world,
partially of their own making, to which they respond creatively and with exquisite sens-
itivity. The earliest spread of bacterial sentience around the globe some 3,500 million
years ago led the nascent Gaia into an increasingly animate relationship with the bright-
ening sun above, and with the carbon dioxide emitted into her atmosphere via volcanoes
from the vast realm of semi-fluid rocks below. This great bacterial web has run the plan-
et to this day, and is, in a way, rather like the unconscious processes that operate key
aspects of our own metabolisms. There must be a seamless transition from this bacterial
sentience to our own, for, as we shall see later, our very own cells are associations of
once free-living bacteria that now engage in sophisticated intra-cellular communication.
If our cells are fundamentally bacterial, then a continuous thread of sentience runs from
us right back to our earliest bacterial ancestors.
Bacteria may appear to be simple when seen from the point of view of the huge
multicellular creatures we are familiar with, but in fact they also display a communal
metabolic versatility that dwarfs our own. Bacteria invented the major techniques for
extracting and storing the energy needed for life, and for capturing key nutrients such
as nitrogen and phosphorus at ambient temperatures. Very soon after life first appeared,
they invented water-based photosynthesis, without which life as we know it would be
impossible. They also invented fermentation, without which we would have no wine or
cheese.
Bacteria have been able to succeed so brilliantly because of their immense capacity
for networking, a skill they have been exercising through geological time, right up to the
present day. A key networking skill that they operate in parallel with quorum sensing
