The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for identifying, (...) from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

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What is cognition? It is now common knowledge that, so far, no one has a ready answer. It is much less generally acknowledged that this is a matter of strong concern when it comes to the further development of the cognitive sciences. We discuss how cognitivism provided a strongly human orientation on cognition, which hindered the development of the standard piecemeal approach, which has been so extremely successful in the biological sciences more generally: first study simple cases and then move (...) onward to more difficult ones. (shrink)

What is cognition? Despite the existence of a science of cognition there is no clear agreement on what makes certain phenomena cognitive, and others not. Within cognitivism the issue was neglected. Human intelligence was used as a standard, and any process—natural or artificial—that fitted this standard sufficiently could be considered ‘cognitive’. For post-cognitivist psychology the situation is different. It cannot rely on the ‘human standard’ in the same way. One might even say that the need for a post-cognitivist psychology arose (...) because cognitivism began with this most complex of all cognitive systems without a good understanding and appreciation of more basic, biological cases. Embodied cognition approaches remedy this anthropocentric bias by addressing a more varied set of processes that are not strictly limited to humans. Under these circumstances the question what we take cognition to be is more urgent. Are phenomena like insect walking (Brooks) and goal-seeking missiles (O’Regan and Noë) examples of cognition or not? What criteria do we use to answer such questions? Given this problem, the notion of perception-action coupling (or sensorimotor contingencies) becomes an important and fairly obvious option to provide a foundation for the notion of cognition. However, and intriguingly, the same problem occurs again: What are perception-action couplings? What would make something an example of perception-action coupling? Where are we to draw a line, if anywhere? It is self-evident that O’Regan and Noë’s (2001) example of a goal-seeking missile is controversial, but why exactly? What is missing? Can we ever do more than making intuitive judgments here? A way out of this dilemma may be found by developing the claim that perception-action coupling must be grounded in a biological context (Keijzer, 2001), and following what Lyon (2005) calls a biogenic approach. This option raises a whole new field of issues and topics that is of central concern for a postcognitivist psychology. (shrink)

In general, there are two ways to approach cognition. One is to start with the features of the human case and try to generalize to other species. Another is to start with the biological conditions under which natural cognition evolved and currently operates and ask what organisms do such that they might require cognition. A full account of cognition requires both. Cognitive biology, however, requires a biogenic approach. Tight integration with biological knowledge places strong constraints on cognitive explanation. These constraints (...) arise from the fact that cognition evolved in a particular context with very special features. All organisms are complex, self-organizing, dynamical systems that exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium and actively maintain themselves in this statistically improbable state by continuously manufacturing the components of the processes that sustain them. Organisms thus must interact with the world in ways that allow them to actively secure matter and energy. They are also persistence-valuing systems: most organisms have mechanisms for resisting or avoiding perturbations that threaten their integrity. A biogenic approach thus stresses the role of mechanisms that facilitate system persistence, for example, those that integrate information concerning external and internal states of affairs to facilitate adaptive behaviour; differentiate some states of affairs from others; invest different properties of the environment with different degrees of salience; appraise system needs relative to prevailing conditions, the potential for interaction, and whether the current interaction is succeeding ; and reduce the impact of random perturbations on system functioning, of which there are many, potentially lethal sources. These are recognisably cognitive functions. Mounting evidence suggests that even bacteria grapple with problems long familiar to cognitive scientists, including: integrating information from multiple sensory channels to marshal an effective response to fluctuating conditions; making decisions under conditions of uncertainty; communicating with conspecifics and others ; and coordinating collective behaviour to increase the chances of survival. Thus a biogenic approach not only justifies the use of very simple biological models to study cognition, it suggests that this is precisely where we ought to look to ascertain the general logic of the function, as well as the mechanisms that carry it out. (shrink)

This chapter highlights Carl Woese’s message about cellular complexity. It addresses the phenotypic distance between a putative, hypothetical ur-replicator or ur-chromosome and anything that can function as a cell that can effectively respond to its environment in ways that maintain its metabolic and physiological integrity. It describes what self-preserving and self-extending behavior in a chemical system minimally involves. This chapter shows that The Major Transitions in Evolution assumes that the emergence of a replicating molecular complex coincides with the emergence of (...) structures with self-preserving characteristics. It then speculates a reason why the “missing transition” has not been missed. (shrink)