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...

“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...

Interesting 📰 @theguardian.com by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social on non-neural cognition: www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte... Confronted with this polarizing debate, @philosobio.bsky.social & I wrote a balanced take on basal #cognition from an #evobio lens 👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #HPS

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.

Wonderful long read on #intelligence and #cognition in #biology: ‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/08/this-is-dangerous-slime-moulds-and-the-bitter-debate-over-the-nature-of-intelligence

“It’s good to have a mould with a strong will to live. You go away for the night, come back the next morning, open the drawer, and find that it has spilled out of its petri dish. The really vigorous moulds escape frequently in this way.”

Tired: "Is AI sentient?" Inspired: "Are slime molds sentient?" www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

“If you think brains and neurons are special, you have to ask yourself: ‘How did they get here?” #neuroskyence www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

I started writing a Guardian Long Read about slime moulds and their weird capabilities (and naturally bought a slime mould kit to do some experiments)...

"If we do acknowledge that [other organisms possess forms of intelligence] we might have to start paying attention to the shocking and horrible things we’re doing to the rest of the living world.” PS Slime molds are awesome! www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Slime moulds are amazing. The In Our Time episode on them a year or two back absolutely blew my tiny mind. Highly recommended

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!

I keep coming across new examples of fields and disciplines that can't agree on a definition of their object of study. From this excellent piece on slime molds and intelligence: "Behavioural biologists do not agree on what constitutes behaviour."

One of the topics we looked at in our documentary The Creeping Garden ten years ago was slime moulds place in debates about what constitutes intelligence. If you've not seen it, the Blu-ray is still available from @arrowvideo.bsky.social here: www.arrowfilms.com/p/the-creepi...