Wiktor Rorot (University of Warsaw, Poland): Lessons from Basal Cognition: Model Organisms for Neuroscience

Basal cognition has begun a silent revolution in cognitive science and philosophy of mind in recent years. The field focuses on organisms without nervous systems, or with a very limited one, such as bacteria, slime moulds, or comb jellies. Its domain is seemingly distant from the central areas of interest of cognitive science. However, the increasing importance of work within basal cognition demands a careful analysis of how scientists interested in organisms with more complex nervous systems, for example primates, can make appropriate inferences and draw insights, rather than only loose inspiration, from this body of research. 

The talk will advance one possible solution, drawing from model-based philosophy of science (Cartwright 1983; Wimsatt 2007). I will argue that cognitive science should make explicit use of the concept of “model organisms”. Existing studies of Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli (reviewed in Ankeny and Leonelli 2021) show how model organisms are employed in contemporary biology and biomedical research, what assumptions this approach requires, and what inferences can be drawn from it. In cognitive sciences, there are de facto model organisms, such as the nematode C. elegans in systems neuroscience, or the mouse M. musculus and the rat R. norvegicus within the Human Brain Project, but they are rarely conceived as such. What results is a lack of a well-structured schema of reasoning based on results from those model systems when moving to other targets, such as the human brain. Basal cognition, with its focus on simple, tractable organisms evolutionarily distant from humans, and a multidisciplinary study of their properties and behaviours can be seen as advancing several proposals of novel model organisms for cognitive science. As such it is bound to complicate this picture even further. 

Drawing on Wimsatt (2007), and Ankeny and Leonelli (2021), I will highlight how a model organism approach to cognitive science enables heuristic use of evidence from basal cognition. Crucially, heuristic reasoning requires understanding the systematic errors inherent in model organisms as models of cognition. In case of basal cognition, some of this knowledge can be derived from careful study of the evolution of cognition (e.g., Cisek 2022; Cisek and Hayden 2022). However, in the general case, given how patchy and opportunistic biology is (Brandon 1997; Mitchell 2000), the misrepresentations accompanying the use of model organisms should be problematized in each individual case. 

To substantiate these arguments, I review the example of the work on signalling across bacterial colonies (e.g., Prindle et al. 2015), plants (e.g., Brenner et al. 2006) and in developmental systems (e.g., Levin 2023), and its impact on our understanding of the brain. I show that the model organisms perspective allows for a systematization of the body of knowledge generated by the field of basal cognition, and avoiding circular reasoning when switching between fields, at the same time preserving the epistemological importance and independence of this research. 

Ankeny, Rachel A., and Sabina Leonelli. 2021. Model Organisms. Elements in the Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108593014. 

Brandon, Robert N. 1997. “Does Biology Have Laws? The Experimental Evidence.” Philosophy of Science 64 (S4): S444–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/392621. 

Brenner, Eric D., Rainer Stahlberg, Stefano Mancuso, Jorge Vivanco, František Baluška, and Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh. 2006. “Plant Neurobiology: An Integrated View of Plant Signaling.” Trends in Plant Science 11 (8): 413–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2006.06.009. 

Cartwright, Nancy. 1983. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198247044.001.0001. 

Cisek, Paul. 2022. “Evolution of Behavioural Control from Chordates to Primates.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377 (1844): 20200522. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0522. 

Cisek, Paul, and Benjamin Y. Hayden. 2022. “Neuroscience Needs Evolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377 (1844): 20200518. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0518. 

Levin, Michael. 2023. “Bioelectric Networks: The Cognitive Glue Enabling Evolutionary Scaling from Physiology to Mind.” Animal Cognition 26 (6): 1865–91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071023-01780-3. 

Mitchell, Sandra D. 2000. “Dimensions of Scientific Law.” Philosophy of Science 67 (2): 242–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/188723. 

Prindle, Arthur, Jintao Liu, Munehiro Asally, San Ly, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo, and Gürol M. Süel. 2015. “Ion Channels Enable Electrical Communication in Bacterial Communities.” Nature 527 (7576): 59–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15709. 

Wimsatt, William C. 2007. Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.