Is natural selection driven by intelligence?

PIT2, where someone else says "The switch was turned on" or "The switch was turned off", you persist in using loaded language like "The switch senses that it was turned on" or "The switch understands that it was turned off". The rest of us can't make any sense out of that.

We are not talking about switches, but about living organisms. Comparing living organisms with switches and thermostats is just as "loaded" as considering that they are conscious.

As for "understanding", i dont know what rade or u are talking about when speaking of this. All ive read here is that there seems to exist the idea that "understanding = multiple neurons" and "intelligence = multiple neurons". However the definitions ive shown do not speak in terms of neurons.

I think what the confusion here is is that "intelligence" really is only a complex series of switches and so one could depict intelligence as existing in all forms of matter in that all forms of matter respond to stimulus or "cause".

However "intelligence" is a concept concieved by humans to describe the complex interactions of neurons in the highly developed brain of the animal "homo sapien sapien". It also describes similar functions in other mammals such as the ape family and the dolphin and whale. Even birds show some intelligence in their use of tools to obtain food (ie: using a stick to coax grubs out of a tree).

The reason we make such a distinction between the less complex "switches' in bacterial molecular make-up and the the more comlex interacting switches of the afore mentioned mammals is because we like to distinquish between levels of complexity for our own purposes. Thus, we classify some sets of molecules as intelligent and some as not intelligent.

In the end we must admit that all living and non-living things are comprised, at one level, of the basic unit of "molecules" that act and react in various ways to various causes. What we say about these structures has no bearing upon what they actually are or are doing. This reminds us of Dr. Bohr's statement where science only represents what we can say about nature... not what nature actually is. To condense what Dr. Bohr is saying one would only need to say "get over yourselves".

I completely agree with this. Intelligence is only a name we agree to give to certain behavior.

Likewise species is only a grouping we have for our own contingent purposes. It doesn't exactly correspond to any objective description (did I hear somebody say "interbreed"?

Consider North American canids, or those species of birds that circle the pole.)

The simplest organisms have reactions that are entirely comparable to switches. So do many studied functions in our brains.

Are you positing some miraculous "life force" that distinguishes a switch mechanism found in a living organism from a similar one made of hardware?

In the end we must admit that all living and non-living things are comprised, at one level, of the basic unit of "molecules" that act and react in various ways to various causes. What we say about these structures has no bearing upon what they actually are or are doing.

So why say that the 'switches' in our brains are intelligent, and the 'switches' in simpler organisms are not?

And the very simplest ones, bacteria, have switch sets comparable to manufactured devices.

Abstract
This paper is devoted to presenting an alternative approach to the Darwinian one. The basic assumption is that the creativity observed in nature is not an illusion but part of an objective reality. In the new picture evolutionary progress is not a result of successful accumulation of mistakes, but is rather the outcome of designed creative processes in the genome.

8. The genome as an adaptive cybernetic unit with self-awareness
We have referred to the genome as an adaptive cybernetic unit [22,33] in order to emphasize that, in our view, it is beyond a universal Turing machine [71]. As I mentioned in the introduction, metaphorically speaking, the genome includes a user with a computational unit and a hardware engineer with a team of technicians for continuous design and implementation of changes in the hardware. Such a complex is beyond a universal Turing machine. In the latter, the structure is static and is decoupled from the input=output and the computation process. The genome is a dynamic entity. If its structure changes adaptively it does so according to the performed computations. It implies that the genome is capable of self-reference, has self-information and, most crucially, has self-awareness. The user represents the ability of the genome to recognize that it faces a diffculty (imposed by the environmental conditions), formulate the problem associated with the diffculty and initiate a search for its solution. As discussed in Section 7, the genome employs its past experience in the process. The user also represents the ability of the genome to interpret and assign meaning to the outcome of its computations and compare it with its interpretation of the environmental conditions.

12. Possible implication of the new picture(Darwinian evolution vs. Cooperative evolution)
If there is indeed genetic communication in eukaryotes, then the state of the eukaryote can directly affect genetic changes in its individual cells, in the same manner that the state of the colony affects genetic changes in the individual bacterium. I would like to emphasize that indeed macro to micro singular feedback should exist for effcient control. In this regard, I believe that there are cells specialized in producing cybernators. The latter affect germ cells, thus, providing a plausible mechanism for designed changes in eukaryotes, changes brought about by the creative acts of genomic webs established within the organism.

http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/papers/...l%20wisdom.pdf
from: http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/bacterial_linguistic.html