University of Bonn biologist František Baluška has an explanation for the apparent design in biology. He believes that there was design involved in evolution — yet not from an outside designer, but from the organisms themselves. He maintains that all living organisms are sentient, even down to simplest bacteria, and that they used their minds to evolve.

You read that right. And it’s not a mischaracterization of his views. For example, here’s how Baluška and his collaborators William B. Miller Jr. and Arthur S. Reber summarize the thesis in a recent paper¹:

The first eukaryotic cells emerged some 2–1.5 billion years ago, which implies that it took nearly two billion years to get from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells. Our cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model states that all living cells utilize cellular sentience to survive and evolve. We argue that the prolonged timeline to evolve eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells was necessitated by the complex level of evolutionary novelty required to assemble unitary consciousness from several formerly independent prokaryotic versions of cellular consciousness, as successive orders of cognition…Once an initiating eukaryotic threshold of cognition was attained, eukaryotic evolution (based on its novel eukaryotic version of cellular sentience and cognition) proceeded relatively rapidly alongside an active unicellular sphere, including a huge diversity of protozoa and other protists that has thrived and evolved until our present day. Some 0.8 billion years ago, and on several occasions, colonial protists invented the multicellular forms that evolved into fungi, animals, and plants, emerging first in the sea and later also on land. Cellular cognition enabled multicellularity and permitted its successful continuous evolution toward the higher level of cohesive cellular complexities exhibited in multicellular organisms, with symbiotic fungal–plant/tree roots networks representing one of its most extensively integrated forms.

Notice the use of the word “invented.” For once, this is not a case of sloppy language or the tendency to anthropomorphize natural selection. They are really saying that protists invented complex multicellular life, using their minds. First life evolved the ability to think; then it used that ability to evolve everything else. As they put it later on: “Evolutionary development is creative not only through either mutations or natural selection but also — and mainly — through the linked cognitive activities and preferences of individual organisms.”

Poetic License? 

Peter Corning, an editor of the volume in which the paper appears, seems a little wary of going all-in on the idea of conscious microorganisms. In his introductory essay to the volume, he says that biologists who say primordial organisms exhibit sensation, choosing, and mind are exercising “poetic license.” 

Poetic license is well and good — in poetry. But poetry does not cut it as scientific explanation. If the idea of primordial consciousness is mere poetry, it does not explain. If, on the other hand, it is not mere poetry… well, that is something very astonishing. It speaks either to a non-physical intellect, or else to a level of ordered complexity much harder to account for than the complex systems it is invoked to explain away in the first place. Neither option is quite tolerable, apparently, so Corning seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. Primordial “consciousness” can be invoked to get past the nasty difficulties with neo-Darwinism, but if it’s called out as too ridiculous, or demanding explanation, that charge can be brushed away with “poetic license.”

At any rate, I see no evidence that Baluška and his colleagues are being the least bit poetical. They make it very clear that what they are talking about is literally mind, cognition, consciousness, sentience — terms they seem to use interchangeably. They attribute mind to primordial organisms, and attribute evolution to the decisions made by these minds. 

Elsewhere, Baluška and Reber write, “let us be clear about what we mean by sentience or consciousess [sic] as it is manifested in unicellular species. We are referring to feelings, subjective states, a primitive awareness of events, including an awareness of internal states.”

But How Does It Work? 

We should acknowledge that this theory is, unlike some similar attempts, at least an actual solution: if true, it would explain how complex life evolved. However, in solving that problem, Baluška and his colleagues create another, equally formidable problem: how does this primordial sentience work, and where did it come from? 

While there does appear to be evidence that plants, fungi, protozoans, bacteria, and archaea respond to the world in a manner that is much more like “thinking” than we are typically taught to believe, there is a lot of mystery about how they do it. The following explanation, from the first paper, is typical:

The plasma membrane provides all cells with a sheltered space, allowing exotic biophysical phenomena based on charged ions, reactive oxygen species, and bioelectric as well as biomagnetic phenomena.

Throw in a random assortment of poorly understood phenomena, and boom! you have consciousness. Of course, the authors would admit that the exact mechanisms of cellular consciousness are still poorly understood. That’s fine. But do they really think that once they uncover the details of these primordial minds, those minds will be easier to explain naturalistically than, say, the bacterial flagellum?

A Cure Worse than the Disease

The thing is, if we ever came down to hard details about what Baluška et al. are proposing, all the old design arguments would still be waiting to be dealt with. There is no reason to hope that “cellular cognition,” “plant neurons,” or a “fungal mind” is less likely to be irreducibly complex or require foresight in its engineering than any other biological system. Actually, it would probably be much more complex than most. 

Essentially, what these researchers are doing is taking the most advanced and perplexing system in biology, the brain, and putting it at the beginning of the evolutionary process instead of the end. That’s a fascinating theory, and they are to be commended for their courage and willingness to think outside the box. If true, it’s revolutionary. But it’s not going to make things easier on unguided evolution.

For now, it might make things easier on scientists who prefer to hide from design arguments rather than face them head on. But in the end, there is no escaping the fact that if this theory is true it speaks to a level of design in nature far more exquisite and improbable than anything hitherto dreamt of. 

Notes

1. Baluška, František, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber. “Cellular Basis of Cognition and Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks.” In Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems, edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross. 33-58. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023.