FT272


When Japanese researchers claimed to have discovered intelli­gence in slime mould, it sounded like a science-fiction nightmare from the fringes of science. But their study was eminently respectable, and further work to understand the anomaly is turning our understanding of intelligence upside down.

Slime mould is a long way down the evolutionary ladder. It’s a fungus-like organism that spends part of its life-cycle as a large number of free-roaming single-celled organisms like amœba. Under some conditions, the individual cells join together into a unified organism that roams the damp forest floor seeking food, in the form of a slime which has been described as looking like dog vomit.