How do single celled organisms do its thing (eat, move etc.) without a brain?

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How do single celled organisms do its thing (eat, move etc.) without a brain?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

You don’t need a brain to respond to stimuli. Plants do it all the time: their leaves prefer orienting toward the sun. Seeds germinate against gravity which is logical because that’s probably up to the surface.

You could see these behaviors as just really specific chemistry. It’s not like the cell thinks “I need to eat.” It just absorbs stuff it has the capacity to absorb, and it also has the machinery to break those things down for fuel. It’s not what we think of as “intelligent,” it’s more robotic. Like flagella just help the cell move, and many cells go the wrong way and end up dead. But plenty end up just fine. And what matters is the survival of the species. Any individual cell isn’t particularly important or smart.