- Becky Ripley and Emily Knight
- BBC, NatureBang Series*
3 hours ago
Credit, Ronald Grant
caption,
A yellow creature that lives in the forest and has no brain but can think
How about we start with a quick test.
You get lost in a huge store that looks like a maze and you don’t know how to get out. Who do you ask for help?
Question 2: You are writing a policy document to advise the US government on how to manage its national borders. Where do you seek advice?
Last question: you need to draw a map of the cosmic web, how do you do it?
There are, of course, multiple answers to these questions, but in all cases you could take inspiration from one organism: the slime mold, also known by many different names.
Scientifically correct, he’s not exactly a white horse…
“Molds are a division of the fungal world, but slime molds are actually protists (not animals, plants, or fungi) — they’re essentially a giant cell,” says biologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of the book Entangled Life, which covers the topic .
Slime mold is a plasmodium, a cell that contains many nuclei. So, unlike most unicellular organisms, you don’t need a microscope to see it.
And this single cell is capable of weaving vast exploratory networks of veinlike tentacles that can stretch up to a meter.
the star among all
There are about 900 species of slime mold, but let’s focus on Physarum polycephalum, which literally means “manyheaded mold.” He is also known as “Blob” (in reference to the classic 1958 film “The Blob”).
Credit, Getty Images
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The popular naming of the slime mold was inspired by the classic film The Blob
Why are the world’s scientists so excited about this particular species?
“It’s become an iconic problemsolving organism. It’s easy to breed and grows quickly, which is one of the reasons it’s been so well studied,” explains Sheldrake.
“But above all, their behavior is extraordinary.”
He can do all sorts of things.
“Explore, solve problems, adapt to new situations, make decisions between alternative courses of action all without a brain!”
How does he do that?
“Physarum is sensitive to the chemical gradient, allowing it to grow towards chemical signals or stay away from unattractive ones.”
“First, it tends to grow in all directions at once. And then when it finds food, it retreats and forms the links between its food sources.”
It’s a bit like being in the desert and having to look for water. You just have to choose a direction to go.
Physarum Polycephalum can “run” in all directions at once until it finds food; then it shrinks the branches that haven’t found anything and strengthens those that haven’t found anything through a series of chemical contractions.
Credit, Science Photo Library
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In one memorable experiment, “Blob” learned to “ignore” the chemicals that blocked his path to food. This behavior indicates a primitive form of memory, and no one knows how it accomplishes this feat.
“It never ceases to amaze me that they can use these contractions to do this kind of analog computation to integrate information without needing a brain. That their coordination takes place everywhere at the same time and nowhere in particular.”
A rail network in Japan
All this means that in human terms, the “blob” is capable of problem solving, forming networks, navigating systems and mazes with incredible efficiency.
There’s an iconic Japanese study from 2010 when Physarum mapped the rail network in Greater Tokyo, and all it took was a small Petri dish and a handful of oatmeal.
According to studies, Physarum loves oatmeal, it’s her favorite food.
“So they modeled the greater Tokyo area by placing oat cups in city centers and then launching. Over the course of a few hours, an efficient network had formed connecting the oat cups, and this network looked very similar to the subway network that exists in the greater Tokyo area,” the study details.
In a matter of hours, Physarum had built an effective network that had taken decades to build in real life.
Credit, Tim Tim/Wikipedia
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Adapted from the illustration from Professor Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s study on the creation and optimization of networks by P. polycephalum.
The “Blob” in the Universe
After the Tokyo study, experiments with Physarum polycephalum began around the world to design new urban transportation networks or find effective fire evacuation routes, even mapping the cosmic web…which sounds strange, but it happened.
A team of scientists has run a digital simulation tracking the locations of 37,000 known galaxies.
So a blobinspired algorithm, adapted from the petri dish to work in three dimensions, was unleashed on a virtual feast where galaxies were represented by stacks of digital oatmeal cups, so to speak.
From there, the algorithm created a 3D digital map of the underlying cosmic web, visualizing the largely invisible strands of matter that astrophysicists believe unite the galaxies of the universe.
They compared it to data from the Hubble Space Telescope, which detects traces of the cosmic web, and found that everything was broadly consistent.
So there seems to be an uncanny resemblance between the two networks, the “blob” network formed by biological evolution and those of structures in the cosmos created by primordial gravity.
Credit, NASA, ESA and J. Burchett and O. Elek (UC Santa Cruz)
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Astronomers have called on creativity in attempting to trace the elusive cosmic web, the backbone of the cosmos. The images show some of the galaxies that the ‘blob’ feeds on (shown in yellow) and the connecting strands of the cosmic web (purple) that overlap.
Academic blobs
Let’s go back to the harsh reality of this little blue dot in space that is our world.
Physarum can also help us with problems that go beyond mapping and networking and into more complex human things like policy making and governance.
“In a way, the Physarum are economists when it comes to achieving a great universe,” says experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats.
In 2018 he went to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, USA, with an idea.
“I have proposed that blobs be appointed visiting professors, with the idea of having a group of these experts on campus to think about some of the world’s toughest problems.”
It was the world’s first academic program for a nonhuman species and was called the Plasmodium Consortium.
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The American University website has a section dedicated to the consortium
Physarum’s polycephaly became official scholars.
“It doesn’t have windows but the blobs don’t like light very much so from their point of view it was good and once they settled in there we were good to go.”
They modeled human problems in a way that blobs could “understand” to gain their unbiased perspective.
“Physarum are superorganisms: they are one, though many. Therefore they are more objective than we are when it comes to human affairs.”
They started with the usual issues of connectivity and mapping, distribution and transportation, before moving on to some larger policy concerns, “from drug policy to issues of our resource use,” notes Keats.
Trump’s wall
Perhaps the most controversial experiments were those dealing with international border politics.
“We created a simplified world, which is what everyone really does when they’re building some kind of model (economists do this all the time).”
“What we did was one of the most basic conditions: one place has one thing, another place has something different, and each place wants to protect what it has from the other.”
Credit, Science Photo Library
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The “Blob” with his favorite dish: oatmeal
They used two essential resources for the blobs, protein and sugar, and spread them out in a petri dish, each on an opposite side, and tried with and without a wall in between, and left Physarum to figure out what to do with it . these resources.
“They not only survived, but thrived without a wall and flourished more in the border area,” explains the researcher.
“So we wrote a letter to Kirstjen Nielsen, who was then Secretary of Homeland Security in the United States, and we also sent it to the United Nations and many other government agencies to tell them that borders are not a good idea and so we.” must overcome the fear of realizing how open borders benefit everyone.”
Absurd?
Of course, these diverse international problems cannot be reduced to a few Petri dishes.
But the point is, these experiments are intentionally overdone to challenge us to think in new ways.
“The Plasmodium Consortium is in a way absurd. People laugh when they hear that the blobs formed an expert group in collaboration with people at a university in the United States, because that’s just not the case.”
But I think there is also something very serious behind it. Physarum have exceptional intelligence, so we need to take some of the insights we get from observing how they behave and think about ourselves in ways we’ve never done before.
That’s the most attractive aspect of it all. That a mindless organism can teach us to be more objective, to think longer term, and to approach a problem in ways we just wouldn’t.
And on some puzzles, like mapping the cosmos, it can be faster than us.
All of this challenges our human definition of intelligence.
Credit, Science Photo Library
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From the bottom of our hierarchies, Physarum is seen as a challenge that is increasingly being studied
“Our hierarchical understanding of intelligence, with humans at the top of the Great Pyramid, reveals the narcissism of our species,” says Sheldrake.
“Thinking about the world without taking ourselves as the standard by which all other living beings should be judged can help dampen some of the hierarchies that underlie modern thinking.”
These hierarchies have caused us homo sapiens to think incredibly highly of ourselves, and that has helped us get far.
But maybe that has already served its purpose.
“I think we humans have to believe in some kind of superiority. This high selfesteem was the engine of dominance. We’ve been able to do more and that’s the result of believing that we can do more,” emphasizes Keats. .
“But we are hitting a limit, to the point where this way of thinking makes the world worse for us and for other species. So it’s time to rethink.”
And a catalyst for this rethinking is Physarum Polycephalum, a singlecelled, mindless protist that sits at the bottom of that hierarchy, from where he can shake up the entire system.
* This article is based on the BBC NatureBang episode “Slime Mold and Problem Solving”. If you want to listen, click here.
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