What do slime molds and COVID-19 have in common?
There’s a type of intelligence that doesn’t require a brain or any sort of central organizing principle. It’s a type of intelligence that only emerges when lots of individual organisms act together in ways that are far greater than any individual parts. It’s called a superorganism where lots of individual organisms work together to solve problems and make decisions that have almost nothing to do with the conditions that any one individual experiences. Instead, those individual actions add up to a collective intelligence. A hive mind, if you will. Take, for instance, the humble slime mold.
When you put it under a microscope it’s clear that you can’t think of a slime mold in the same way as you do a plant. It isn’t one cohesive blob of goop, rather it’s a colony of hundreds of millions of individual mold particles that replicate and grow as a population. Every cell is its own autonomous creature. However, the colony acts in concert together in a way that forms intricate shapes and what, from a macro level, is a discrete super organism. That super organism can do some pretty amazing things. Like, for instance, solving mazes.
See here:
A slime mold colony spreading out in a natural environment (left) a slime mold completing a maze (right)
On the left you see a slime mold growing on a tree stump as the tendrils of the colony reach out, absorb nutrients and grow. A few decades ago researchers began to wonder how intelligent that search for food could get...so they put a slime mold colony into the maze which you can see on the right. The maze held a nutrient stash on either side, and it was the colony’s task to spread through the maze and eat up the food as efficiently as possible. Lo and behold, the slime mold colony found a path through the twists and turns of the maze, so that all its individual slime organisms would thrive together and stay out of areas that didn’t offer a path to the food source. The researchers concluded that the slime mold colony was intelligent in and of itself.
Ant colonies, bees and coral reefs display similar miraculous abilities. As far back as 1789 the first geologist James Hutton began to think about the entire earth acting in concert as a single intelligent entity. In the 1970s other philosophers refined the idea until it became the Gaia hypothesis.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the smarts of slime molds as they relate to what we’ve all lived through with COVID-19, or for that matter, pandemics in general. When you see an illustration in the media of the virus it usually looks something like this:
A typical representation of what the corona virus looks like.
In other words, a bunch of individual spiky proteins that invade the human host, pierce our cellular defenses, replicate in our cells, and then spread to other vulnerable parts of our bodies. From the strict reductionist perspective the corona virus is an individual organism. Most scientists aren’t even sure viruses are alive. The coronavirus, and all its strains only really exist as individual units on a microscopic scale--the disease is merely the unthinking result. Thus, in this line of thinking, when the virus mutates and changes, these new variants are entirely new evolutionary lines that descend from a single viral particle and out-compete older variants. There’s nothing collective about the virus--which is one reason our vaccines target the virus on the particle level. The language of modern science only sees the individual viruses.
On the other hand, when most people actually speak about the disease COVID-19 we are really talking about how all those virus particles act in concert. This is the field of epidemiology. It’s also the realm of lived experience, newspaper articles and social media posts. When a person gets sick from COVID, their symptoms only emerge after hundreds of millions of viral particles act in concert together and cause the illness, or even death.
At an even larger level, the spread of COVID 19 looks like what you see in this Washington Post timeline of the first year of the covid spread.
The spread of the COVID-19 virus over the course of 2019 where each pixel represents a death and each color a different month.
When you look at a map like this of COVID-19 deaths over the course of 2020, it’s clear that we’re not talking about the path of individual viral particles. We’re instead visualizing all those viral particles acting together on millions of human bodies. The virus flows through urban areas like slime mold sucking up food. These maps illustrate the spread of the superorganism COVID-19 itself. Over the course of this pandemic humans have tried to throw up roadblocks against the pandemic--from social distancing and mask wearing, to vaccines and the political discord that we’ve all grown to accept as normal.
COVID-19 responds to the conditions on the surface of the earth by evolving new strains of virus and spreading out across the world into vulnerable pockets in the same way that slime molds gobble up nutrients. When we look at the COVID pandemic from this lens, the individual virus particles are a lot less interesting than their collective action.
The pandemic we have been living through for the last two years has an alien intelligence all of its own. It solves problems, overcomes obstacles and uses the natural process of evolution to adapt to its host. In The Wedge I wrote how humanity is also a super organism where the collective action of all humans together is far greater--and weirder--than any individual’s intelligence. Taken from this perspective, the question of whether viruses are alive or not is no longer important. Instead we should consider a more profound question: is the virus conscious?