Scientists Debate Whether Slime Moulds Qualify as Intelligence, Guardian

It’s interesting, as a historian of biology, to think about why some observations of living nature cause us conceptual problems. Insightful reflections on what cognition is. Go slime moulds! www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Slime moulds emerged 600m years ago, an eternity compared to 300,000 years that Homo sapiens emerged “If you cut one slime mould into four pieces, those pieces are all the same – they’re clones of each other, so you’d expect them to behave the same way,” Dussutour said. “But they act differently.

“Why? Why should we be so arrogant as to assume that our behaviour and our natural history is the lens through which to understand Earth?” Excellent question: but those who demand we #Unlearn human exceptionalism & arrogance can expect angry resistance www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Although slime moulds are not intelligent, they are surprisingly hard to remove. Like the one that has infested the White House

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte... I still love this Physarium experiment and tell people about it. Mindblowing!

‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

🧪Chicken or egg? Can cognition haapen without neurons? And what happened before neurons evolved? www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

This is a fascinating read about the nature of cognition and intelligence, and bonus points for "In labs, slime moulds are reared on oat flakes, a convenient diet that can double as a researcher’s breakfast". 😁

Dare I describe an article about slime moulds and theories of cognition as delightful? A welcome break from an otherwise extremely depressing news cycle, ft. gems such as "It’s good to have a mould with a strong will to live", a book called "Moi le Blob" and furiously heated academic debate

“The unexpected truth of the debates stirred up by slime moulds, trees and AI is that they show up the inadequacy of human language. Trying to capture the endless nuance of life on Earth with our clumsy words is like recreating the Pantone colour catalogue with three crayons.”

Slime Molds and a double Ig Nobel Prize winner and a big, great science adventure https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/08/this-is-dangerous-slime-moulds-and-the-bitter-debate-over-the-nature-of-intelligence

we are afraid "that this thing we call intelligence which we value in ourselves – all living things have a share of that, in whatever attenuated sense. If we do acknowledge that, we might have to start paying attention to the shocking and horrible things we’re doing to the rest of the living world.”

Given the Guardian article on intelligence in slime moulds this morning, The Blob seems like a good bet...

“To those of the old consensus – the neuropurists, as I came to think of them – these claims are sacrilege. Lincoln Taiz, a veteran plant physiologist, has dismissed biogenic theorists as having “brain envy”. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...