In New intelligence model could upend biology, genetics, medicine and AI by Loz Blain, we learn about basically a form of intelligence in biology which adds some evidence to the possibility of agential "spirit atoms" as taught by the apostles Orson Pratt and John Widstoe. Consider these excerpts from the interesting article:
Picasso tadpoles" with scrambled facial features successfully rearrange themselves into normal-looking frogs, showing a flexible kind of problem-solving 'intelligence' as opposed to a rigid DNA-driven set of growth instructions ...
... Levin and his collaborators have done on 'Xenobots' – freeing groups of cells from their organisms and allowing them to self-assemble into entirely new creatures, which use their cellular intelligence and bioelectrical communication to develop their own unique behaviors – or can be externally designed and programmed. ...
Molecular intelligence
Levin's team has broadened its focus beyond just looking at living cells, finding that the subroutine patterns that can get part of a job done apparently nest all the way down to the molecular level.
"All of these levels," he tells Maynard, "are made up of sub-agents that solve problems in various spaces; anatomical space, physiological space, whatever – and they have different competencies and different agendas. Each layer is taking advantage of what I call this agential material – you have to engineer it very differently than you would engineer passive, or even active matter.
"And it goes even below cells. I mean, we're studying the learning capacities of molecular networks. Never mind whole cells, even the molecular networks have probably at least six different kinds of learning capacity.
"We need to have some kind of way of talking about molecular systems as having intelligence, because we have to be able to tell a story of scaling. We all start life as an unfertilized ova, a little blob of chemistry and physics. And there's no lightning bolt that at some point says 'ok, you were physics, but now you're a real mind.' We need a paradigm for how intelligence scales from simpler forms.
"The kind of intelligence that I'm talking about is the kind that William James defined as same goal by different means. So it's really a navigational intelligence. It's a publicly observable, perfectly empirically testable, problem-solving capacity. I am not talking about consciousness, I am not talking about self-aware meta-intelligence where you know how intelligent you are, I'm not talking about any of that. I'm talking about the ability to navigate a problem space and get your goals met, despite various new things that are going to happen."
From this evidence, I don't find it hard to believe that below the cell is the atom and quarks and strings according to string theory and then agential spirit atoms. As pictured below:
