Things get more confusing when I talk about how fungi are the original farmers. But I don’t mean that anthropomorphically. I just mean farmer as “an entity that farms”
Susanne Simard, who knows trees better than fungi, tries to ascribe a sense of fairness to how forest food web fungi share and disburse minerals, sugars and water. Personally I just see osmotic pressure. Not as the only driver (see also arbitrage), but the one responsible for most of that “fairness”.
I think that all living beings and even cells within a living being possess a form of intelligence. Though I don't know enough about biology to defend that intuitive understanding with the rigor that many HN readers would require and many here would possess.
Cells are mobile, hunt, some even see using photoreceptive organelles on the inside of a section of cell wall using the cytoplasm as a lens. The function of many organelles clearly visible in cells under microscopy is still unknown. But it's clear they're doing a fair amount of computation and behaving intelligently. I'm struck by how similar gene regulatory network maps can look to function call graphs[1] and ion channel receptors in cell walls behave very similarly to transistors with on/off but also signal amplification applications. The more I watch them under microscopy, the harder it is not to think of cells as little animals unto their own. A great channel for beautiful footage is https://www.youtube.com/@journeytomicro
Things get more confusing when I talk about how fungi are the original farmers. But I don’t mean that anthropomorphically. I just mean farmer as “an entity that farms”
Susanne Simard, who knows trees better than fungi, tries to ascribe a sense of fairness to how forest food web fungi share and disburse minerals, sugars and water. Personally I just see osmotic pressure. Not as the only driver (see also arbitrage), but the one responsible for most of that “fairness”.