First, a short announcement: Anny Ballardini has a lot of good stuff in Truck, which she is driving this month. She just posted something of mine at http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.it/2014/11/bob-grumman.html.
Now for a continuation of my entry of two days ago, with a repetition of the end of the latter. I’m floundering but hope no one notices.
First there were simple crystallizations, or so I believe “informed” speculation has it; certainly, it makes sense to me. Eventually, molecules containing carbon complicate things. Amino acids, stuff like that. Proteins, eventually. I had a not-totally unsound knowledge of dna/ rna/etc at one time; only have what I need to theorize now: in other words, nothing I can gussy up my musings with.)
The crystallizations formed membranes, or some equivalent thereof, and became able to take in substances that would make them grow, and excrete substances that might otherwise destroy them. (None of this is original, by the way, except inasmuch as I get my remembrance of things I’ve read wrong.) When they get large enough, they divide.
CONTINUATION
Eventually, carbon compounds get into the picture. Let’s call what we now have “the alphazoan” (elitism alert, elistism alert!!!) for yesterday’s superior lifeform that will eventually evolve into today’s us. It will begin just bumping into things, some of which it digests, some of which digest its siblings, but—by chance—not it. By chance, it eventually develops a membrane that tends to let in good stuff and block bad stuff.
It multiplies. So do other kinds of zoa with equal adaptations. Some become prey, others become predators it must avoid. Our boy will by luck do the latter.
It will also develop a means of propulsion. Something that makes it go constantly forward (by definition) may be advantageous because it causes it to bump into edibles more frequently, especially stationary ones. At the same time, it will cause it to bump into something that eats things like it more frequently. Conclusion: neither an advantage nor disadvantage . . . at first.
One way things could plausibly go is that its membrane evolves a part, a sensory unit, that is sensitive to touching some other zoan and reacting in some manner. It seems to me this might become a permanent trait although irrelevant for a long time.
Previously, perhaps (bear with me, I’ll be jumping around), the alphazoan will have formed the first biological sensory-unit, my guess is one that is sensitive to light. More exactly, a unit that will react chemically to a photon. Meaningless, until the reaction in some way causes motion. That motion will most likely be either toward or away from light. The alphazoan, necessarily for the purposes of my story Very Lucky, will automatically go toward light, and lit areas will turn out to be good areas for him—lots of prey, say, and few predators.
Meanwhile, others developing similar sensors will go extinct because of being directed toward the dark or not liking the food in lit areas.
Once the alphazoan has evolved a single trait that can use a stimulus in the environment to guide the alphazoan to or from something, the zoan has a kind of will. It can now react with motion to some stimulus. This means it can evolve many other like sensory-unit-motion-effectors such as a unit in its membrane sensitive to the tactile sensation caused by a predator that has touched it, and reacting with motion the other way; or reacting to the touch of a prey the other way. Proto-reflexes.
Eventually, sensory-units will develop that can distinguish shades of light and make more sophisticate behavior possible: e.g. motion toward something of a certain gray which is edible and away from something else a slightly different shade of gray which isn’t, or is a predator.
We are now approaching proto-intelligence, or the first brain. This will occur when a sensory-unit activates a relay-unit rather than a motion-unit, and the relay-unit activates the motion-unit. It will be hit&miss until one of these mechanisms does something biological advantageous, probably nothing new, like moving away from a stimulus of a certain shade of gray, but for the first time giving the alphazoan wider possibilities—i.e., the ability to hook up with any effector in the zoan, rather than one close by. Small advantage, but one which keeps the protobrain in each zoan the alphazoan divides into until greater advantages are possible.
It won’t happen all at once, but incrementally it will come to pass that two relay-cells will share a brain (the zoan will eventually have several “brains”) neither ad- nor disad-vantageously. The next step will be crucial: One relay-cell will develop the ability to inhibit the other. This will pay off when its sensor detects predator ahead and the other relay-unit’s sensory detects prey ahead.
Instead of trying to advance and retreat simultaneously, the zoan will retreat. (Ever luck, remember: many other zoa will develop brains that make them advance instead of holding their ground.)
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