Can an amoeba be a genius?

By Maria Odete Madeira

What does the notion of genius synthesize? What values? What cultural, social and, above all, political values, are involved here?

Any organism is dispositionally gifted to perform tasks that concern its survival, some organisms exhibit greater ease in the performance of some tasks while others exhibit greater ease in the performance of other tasks. Genius is just a name for those that can maximize these abilities in order to transcend patterns considered normal, but this depends on training, willpower, and also of available means. All of us can be geniuses in different ways. For instance, a "simple" domestic worker, especially gifted to that kind of work, can be a genius, even if society would not classify such a worker as a genius, because it is a type of work without sufficiently relevant social value (no Nobel prize for domestic workers).

In certain societies the genius would be the one who found good solutions to the community's problems, and, not necessarily, for instance, the individual capable of feats of abstract reasoning but otherwise socially awkward and capable of having contra-adaptive responses when put before basic survival problems. Thus, for instance, the pattern of genius, in the first case, might depend upon an ability for common sense thinking and/or for finding good responses to adaptive problems. In such a sense, even an amoeba or any organism that reveals robust adaptive effectiveness can be considered a genius.

All the neurobiological cognitive work is supported by an image space and a dispositional space, supported, in turn, by distinct neural bases activated in the limbic cortices and in subcortical nuclei, whose work depends upon and is inseparable of an integrated organismic work, in permanent interface with the environment. And when we speak of organism we speak of bones, flesh, blood, homeostatic mechanisms, emotions, feelings, etc…