One often answers this question by characterizing living organisms with attributes such as reproduction, metabolism, interacting with their environment, or even the processing of information. Insights into the complex biomolecular machinery within living cells that allow them to perform these functions have exploded exponentially in recent years. Despite these advances, the truth about the essence of life continues to elude any approach that ignores metaphysical aspects manifest in even the simplest biological forms.

The signs of a paradigm shift towards a teleological view of life have emerged even within the mainstream academy. As Mind Matters News explains:

It turns out that evolution is much more teleological than has been historically supposed. Not only has the prior evidence for the non-teleology of evolution mainly been overturned, but new research has increasingly focused on the teleological and teleonomic causes that underlie much of what shapes the direction of evolution.

“Goal-directed” behavior is unsupported within pure naturalism, but it would be expected if living things were designed by an intelligent agent. The behavior of living creatures appears to transcend a mechanistic version of teleology and exhibits qualities that are consistent with the essence of life as an imparted quality quite untraceable to physical origin.

Cells as “Sentient Beings”

Recently, microbiological research has come to entertain the notion that individual cells, in cooperation with other cells, possess a form of consciousness.

University of Chicago biochemist James Shapiro titled a 2021 journal paper “All living cells are cognitive.”

An earlier paper by Shapiro claims that “cells are sentient beings.”¹

Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell–cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilise sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of ‘higher’ plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognise that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.

Shapiro further describes this growing recognition of cellular cognition as a Kuhnian paradigm shift to view life as “informatics.”

My own view is that we are witnessing a major paradigm shift in the life sciences in the sense that Kuhn (1962) described that process. Matter, the focus of classical molecular biology, is giving way to information as the essential feature used to understand how living systems work. Informatics rather than mechanics is now the key to explaining cell biology and cell activities.

Astrophysicist Adam Frank also describes life in terms of information usage:²

But there’s another and perhaps more all-encompassing way of understanding life that puts information front and center. In this view, what makes life special — what makes it different from all the other physical systems — is its ability to use information.

Recognizing Cellular Intelligence 

Tufts University biologist Michael Levin identifies attributes of living cells that are foreign to a purely naturalistic way of thinking about life. He cites features such as goal-oriented cooperation, behaving cleverly, “problem-solving competencies,” and acting as “competent agents with preferences, with goals, with various abilities to pursue those goals, and other types of problem-solving capacities.”

Levin excuses researchers’ earlier failure to recognize cellular intelligence, saying “we really are very bad at recognizing intelligence in unconventional embodiments where our basic expectations strain against this idea that there could be intelligence in something extremely small or extremely large.” It’s an interesting irony that this blind spot applies to Levin himself, who along with many others, “really are very bad at recognizing” the signatures of intelligent design found pervasively throughout the biological realm.

The Source of Intelligence

If intelligence manifests even at the single-cell level, it becomes scientifically relevant to inquire as to its source. Some observers recognize intelligence as having a metaphysical origin. According to a recent ERG working group email:

[T]here appears to be a hierarchical organizational metaphysical masterpiece that unfolds as you pull back the curtains on cellular life.

Are we seeing that awareness and the rudiments of intelligence are an inherent accompaniment to life itself? James Barham comments on Shapiro’s statements about cellular intelligence with a discussion of various views of vitalism.

Historically, the term has most often been associated with the idea that a supernatural ‘life force’ impinges on living matter from the outside.

Barham offers the opinion that this historical view of vitalism would in principle debar scientific investigation of “the nature of the difference between the living state of matter and inorganic matter.” However, knowing, for example, that an advanced microelectronic device was made by intelligent designers from another place need not, even in principle, undercut scientific investigation of the device to see how it works. Likewise, we can learn the processes of biochemical engineering by studying cells, believing that they were intentionally designed, with arguably greater success than by studying them under the misguided presupposition of materialism.

Barham states that vitalism can also “refer to the claim that living things have properties and causal powers arising from within that are more than the sum of the properties and powers of the inanimate parts of which they are composed.” Such a position subscribes to an “emergentist” view of living systems that defies the traditional reductionistic approach to science.

My Reasons for Suspicion

As a physicist, I am suspicious of any claim of new and extraordinary properties of matter that are inconsistent with established and experimentally verified workings of the forces of nature. To claim that sophisticated “emergent properties” arise from collections of fundamental particles in specific complex arrangements, beyond what could be predicted by the laws of physics, is unwarranted and has no more scientific credibility than an appeal to magic.

What is scientifically credible is to claim that complex, functional arrangements of matter can result from the action of intelligent designers (my laptop is a case in point). The complexity of the simplest living organism far exceeds that of the most advanced human-engineered device. Above, life was described by its ability to use information. One of the traditionally recognized attributes of living things, that explicitly relies upon the creation, storage, retrieval, and usage of information, is their ability to reproduce (in theory, given the right conditions, forever). The origin of self-replication cannot be explained naturally and to describe it as an emergent property of matter violates mathematical analysis and known laws of nature. 

Not All Things Are Possible Naturally!

However, to ascribe self-replication in living things to an intelligent designer is a conclusion consistent with our well-established understanding of nature’s abilities and limitations. If the origin of the physical process of self-replication exceeds the limits of nature, claiming that cellular intelligence arises naturally is clearly not a scientific conclusion. 

It is well within the purview of scientific investigation for a scientist to draw a conclusion of “natural” or “unnatural.” For example, when astronomers observe a star near the center of our galaxy moving on an elliptical path with no visible object to cause such an orbit, they don’t conclude that some new law of motion has emerged, superseding Newton’s first law of motion. They conclude instead, consistent with established laws of physics, that since this star isn’t moving in a straight line, an external force must be acting on it, such as the gravity of a supermassive blackhole. Further applications of known laws of physics allow astronomers to accurately calculate the mass of this black hole³, even without being able to see it visibly.

A Dry Well

Naturalism is a dry well when it comes to explaining any of the attributes of cellular cognizance. Rather than recognizing such unphysical attributes as consistent with a view of God as the author of life, naturalism seems to be dredging up debris from pantheism and extending it to universal consciousness. Denyse O’Leary comments on the appeal and shortcomings of this view:

Panpsychism recognizes the reality of consciousness in the world of life. That is its strength. That is why it is slowly making inroads against materialism (physicalism, eliminationism, etc.). However, it avoids grappling with the reality of an Intelligence that is not and cannot be a part of nature. That is its weakness.

The strength of the intelligent design explanation for life lies in its full-orbed ability to address all aspects of life — its origin, complex biochemistry, information focus, consciousness, and ultimate purpose. Alternative views, when examined within the limits of nature, can only explain the “return to dust” of living organisms that have ceased to live, but they fail to explain the essence of life.

Notes

1. J. A. Shapiro, “Bacteria are small but not stupid: cognition, natural genetic engineering and socio-bacteriology,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 38 (2007) 807–819).
2. Adam Frank, “Biology or technology: Which moves more information per second?,” Biology vs. tech: Which moves more information per second? — Big Think (January 19, 2024).
3. “The supermassive black hole lurking at the heart of the Milky Way — Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short — contains about 4.3 million solar masses.” See, “Black hole contains nearly all the mass at the heart of the Milky Way,” Astronomy Now, 17 January 2022.