摘要：

I describe how bacteria develop complex colonial patterns by utilizing intricate communication capabilities, such as quorum sensing, chemotactic signaling and exchange of genetic information (plasmids) Bacteria do not store genetically all the information required for generating the patterns for all possible environments. Instead, additional information is cooperatively generated as required for the colonial orga-nization to proceed. Each bacterium is, by itself, a biotic autonomous system with its own internal cellular informatics capabilities (storage, processing and assessments of information). These afford the cell certain plasticity to select its response to biochemical messages it receives, including self-alteration and broadcast-ing messages to initiate alterations in other bacteria. Hence, new features can collectively emerge during self-organization from the intra-cellular level to the whole colony. Collectively bacteria store information, perform decision make decisions (e.g. to sporulate) and even learn from past experience (e.g. exposure to antibiotics) – features we begin to associate with bacterial social behavior and even rudimentary intelli-gence. I also take Schrdinger's ' "feeding on negative entropy " criteria further and propose that, in addition organisms have to extract latent information embedded in the environment. By latent information we refer to the non-arbitrary spatio-temporal patterns of regularities and variations that characterize the environ-mental dynamics. In other words, bacteria must be able to sense the environment and perform internal

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