a. The human mind trumps all other known mechanisms as a means of
survival. This is why human beings are the dominant life form
on this
planet.
To go just a little further on these lines, the basic strategy of the
bacterium runs as follows:
a) if things are getting better or going ok:
keep on swimming
b) if things are getting worse:
pick a new direction, and keep on swimming.
You'll notice it's an awfully short-sighted algorithm. The fancy term
for this situation is that the control loop lacks an integral term; the
result is that bacteria are good at finding local optima, but aren't so
good at hitting them exactly -- like genetic populations, they're
doomed by the mathematics of random walks to circling about their
summum bonum* (should by chance any achieve it, it's only a transitory
condition).
Before we get too enamored of our own intelligence, perhaps we should
run a cost-benefit analysis to see if the 20 watt burn rate for our
grey matter is producing sufficiently better results when compared with
the very roughly 0,2 picowatt burn rate for the bacterium.
-Dave
* "suffering" among the unicellular might be said to consist of
generically being delta away from that which they "desire".
