Cognition, Information Fields and Hologenomic Entanglement: Evolution in Light and Shadow

Abstract

As the prime unification of Darwinism and genetics, the Modern Synthesis continues to epitomize mainstay evolutionary theory. Many decades after its formulation, its anchor assumptions remain fixed: conflict between macro organic organisms and selection at that level represent the near totality of any evolutionary narrative. However, intervening research has revealed a less easily appraised cellular and microbial focus for eukaryotic existence. It is now established that all multicellular eukaryotic organisms are holobionts representing complex collaborations between the co-aligned microbiome of each eukaryote and its innate cells into extensive mixed cellular ecologies. Each of these ecological constituents has demonstrated faculties consistent with basal cognition. Consequently, an alternative hologenomic entanglement model is proposed with cognition at its center and conceptualized as Pervasive Information Fields within a quantum framework. Evolutionary development can then be reconsidered as being continuously based upon communication between self-referential constituencies reiterated at every scope and scale. Immunological reactions support and reinforce self-recognition juxtaposed against external environmental stresses.

Senomic view of the cell: SenomeversusGenome

“…Indeed, it has been argued that life should properly be defined through the property of self-referential cognition [31,34]. Furthermore, recent advances have also revealed that neuronal aspects and cognitive capacities are valid concepts for unicellular organisms too [14,16,22,35].…”

“…All biological organisms during their evolution are shaped by their self-referential adaptation to an ever-changing environment [31,49]. As this environment is often rather hostile and extremely variable, all organisms in order to survive need to extract, process, store and use faithful and effective information about their environment [49,50].…”

“…As this environment is often rather hostile and extremely variable, all organisms in order to survive need to extract, process, store and use faithful and effective information about their environment [49,50]. It has been previously argued that this process of information extraction and reception, and its further communication and deployment, is based on a consistent reiterative self-referential information cycle that undergirds all cellular life [31,34,49–51]. In such circumstances, genetic information and epigenetic inputs must be viewed as elements of a toolkit as part of the cell-wide information cycle by which cellular organism sense and adapt to environmental stresses [51].…”

“…Only such a focus and approach to these self-referential phenomena will allow us to fully understand their biological basis as well as their true non-genomic and primary nature. Since any viewpoint that the cell is a functional automaton no longer comports with scientific data, those sources of informational input and the complex mechanisms by which information is assessed, communicated, deployed and managed becomes the new ground state of any detailed understanding of cellular life or the holobionts that are its collective product [31,53]. As each biological organism is inevitably a subject, and its world-view is constructed internally from its particular self-referenced Senome evolved during its specific evolutionary trajectory and enfolded during its individual life, it is obvious that the Senome o f each organism is unique.…”

“…In other words, the Senome is a smart perceptual “gate” which first receives and then channels all the acquired sensory information into the interior of the organism [55]. Here, this information is used to drive downstream metabolic and motoric processes according to the proscriptions of the cell’s information management system [31,34]. Therefore, it can be proposed that the Senome is the collective attachment to the informational matrix of the environment that propels internal cycles of biological information upon which all cells depend.…”