Linnaeus, who spent his life sorting living things into boxes, put the slime moulds in a genus he called Chaos. The name was a confession. Here was a thing that exuded slime but was not a mould, crept but was not an animal, made nothing from light and was not a plant, and could dry to a crust and wake up when it rained. The box was labelled with the absence of a box.
Samanth Subramanian’s long read for the Guardian picks the story up where taxonomy left it. Toshiyuki Nakagaki, forty years ago an undergraduate in Hokkaido, noticed a lemon-yellow stain in a petri dish moving at a centimetre an hour, and has spent his career since on Physarum polycephalum, a single cell with many nuclei that can cover a couple of square metres of forest floor. In 2000 he had it find the shortest path through a maze to an oat flake. In 2010 he laid oat flakes in the pattern of Tokyo and its satellite towns, released the mould from the centre, and watched it build a network close to the actual railway map, and possibly a better one. The mould does not solve the maze as a person would. It grows into every corridor at once and then withdraws from all but the shortest, which is a different thing, and the piece is honest enough to say so.
The argument the piece is about is who gets to use the word, more than whether the mould is clever. For more than a century the working assumption was that cognition needs neurons, which put animals on one side of a line and everything else on the other, with humans at the far end of the animal side. Since the 1980s a group of biologists and philosophers, Pamela Lyon and Michael Levin the loudest among them, have argued that cognition runs through all life and not only through animals with nervous systems, and Lyon says humans have regarded themselves for too long as the crown of creation because of their intelligence. The reaction has been what happens when a boundary is touched. Thirty-six plant scientists signed a letter in 2007 declaring that plant neurobiology added nothing to plant physiology and did not deserve the name. One signatory called it the last serious confrontation between the scientific community and the nuthouse. When Lyon co-edited a special issue on cognition for the Royal Society in 2021, one reviewer wrote that the idea was dangerous and must not be dignified in a journal of that stature.
Among the neuropurists, as Subramanian names them, Alex Kacelnik, who has studied how New Caledonian crows use tools, says that an oak tree “decides” how many acorns to make and when to drop them, and that calling this cognition solves nothing. It trivialises the question of how the oak does it, or defines it out of existence. He will use the word only where he can show an internal algorithm and something like concept formation. That is a demand for precision, and precision is what words are for.
The category is a tool, and the trouble starts when the tool is mistaken for the “thing” it sorts. The oak goes on dropping acorns either way.
Levin’s reply is about what the line hides rather than what it protects. Neurons arrived late. For most of the history of life, cells found their way around without them, doing, in his phrase, pretty much the same thing at slower speeds, and evolution is a hoarder that does not throw away working machinery when a faster version turns up. He makes the point with the word “adult”. Nothing changes on an eighteenth birthday, but the law needs a line, so a line is drawn and everyone agrees to pretend. Cognition, memory and intelligence, he says, are that kind of word. Putting quotation marks around them when a slime mould is involved adds nothing scientific. It only says who is allowed to know.
Anne Pringle at Wisconsin asks the question that turns the debate around: why does Physarum have to be useful to humans, a designer of rail networks, a logic circuit, before it counts as interesting? Being a good engineer is a human value. The mould became important the moment it did something a human would be paid for.
Four days later in the same newspaper, Zoe Williams’s interview with Naomi Klein opens on a mountain at Davos in January, where Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff described to an audience a gated paradise city to be built on Gaza, one of them with tears in his eyes. Klein’s new book with Astra Taylor, End Times Fascism, starts there, and Williams names the scene for what it was: the world’s richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave. The seduction rituals of the neoliberal decades, Davos and Aspen and TED promising to cure the sick so that nobody would fear the wealth, have stopped; Peter Thiel’s panels before the 2024 election named sustainable development and social responsibility as “the enemy”. Klein’s reading is that a small group now holds so much financial, technological and military weaponry that it no longer needs to be liked.
Wealth, she says at the end, has its own deranging effect. It almost inevitably turns the holder into a supremacist, because humans are creatures of story, and a person with that much in a time of that much want needs a story about why. The only story on offer is that there is something about them that justifies it. Once that story is in place, the rest of the living world is what the story is about being above. She calls them traitors to creation, and says she has earned the right to escalate. Asked where her anger comes from, she says the stars. She lives in a wild corner of British Columbia, and on a dark night the sky there was a blanket of them. Now satellites crawl through it, with a hundred times more promised. Who said Musk could, she asks. Who gave him that right.
One gesture at two scales. Neither piece says so. A discipline draws a hard line around intelligence and puts humans above it. A class draws a hard line around desert and puts itself above it. In both cases the line is defended as precision and functions as rank. Lyon says it near the end of the slime mould piece: if all living things have a share of what humans value in themselves, then attention would have to be paid to what is being done to the rest of the living world. Klein says it from the other side of the line, about people who have decided the rest of the living world is not their problem. Slime moulds are the case where the line is being contested from below. Billionaires are the case where it is being redrawn from above.
The slime mould piece has a sentence that belongs in both stories. Silicon Valley, the piece observes, loves the biogenic camp, because any account of intelligence as data and computation validates the I in AI, and there is no better way, one scientist remarks, to treat humans as machines than to start treating machines as humans. That is the same line again, drawn in silicon.
The mechanism Klein describes, an advantage handed out and a story of merit grown over it, has been produced in laboratories with people who watched the advantage being handed out.
Molina, Bucca and Macy had 996 people play a card game online in which, between rounds, the winners of the last round kept their strongest cards and the losers handed theirs over, or the reverse, or cards were swapped at random. Winners were twice as likely as losers to call the outcome fair whichever way the rules tilted, and more likely to put it down to talent, in a game where talent played no part.
Deffains, Espinosa and Thöni gave people a counting task in a hard or an easy version, assigned by lot and never disclosed, then told them whether they had scored above or below the median. Those above it credited their effort and, asked to move money between two other people whose earnings were not theirs, moved less of it. Those below blamed the task and moved more.
Power does something of the same kind to the view of other people. Gruenfeld, Inesi, Magee and Galinsky found in 2008, across six studies, that people put in a position of power approached others according to their usefulness to the goal in hand, regardless of their other human qualities, and that the effect held across several ways of granting power, several kinds of goal and several kinds of usefulness.
That is Klein’s story about why, produced in an afternoon by an advantage the winner had seen dealt. Her people as things is a further step that the games do not take, and Gruenfeld’s power studies are the nearest measurement of it, on a different cause.
What has not held up cleanly is the claim about the wealthy themselves. Piff and colleagues reported in 2012 that people of higher social class behaved less ethically across seven studies, including two on the street: drivers of more expensive cars cut off other drivers at a four-way stop, and pedestrians at a crossing, more often than drivers of cheap ones. Jung, Smeets, Stoop and Vosgerau reran both field studies in 2023, preregistered and with larger samples, and found no evidence of a relationship between the car and the behaviour, and direct replications of two of the laboratory studies came back empty as well. The field evidence is not all one way: Coughenour and colleagues watched 461 cars at two Las Vegas crossings and found the odds of a driver yielding to a pedestrian falling three per cent for every thousand dollars of the car’s value. So the deranging effect has been shown in people handed a rigged win, and only inconsistently in people who happen to own an expensive car. As a claim about the handful of people who own a satellite constellation, it has not been measured, because there is no control group and they do not fill in questionnaires. Klein’s evidence is what they say in public, which is a different kind of evidence, and her point is that they have stopped bothering to disguise it.
Wouter Schakel linked Dutch public opinion to 291 proposed policy changes between 1979 and 2012 and found policy following high incomes far more than low or median ones, in a country he picked as the least likely place to find it. The mechanism his data support is participation: the wealthier take part, the poorer less so, and Mahler, Jesuit and Paradowski found across fourteen countries that the more turnout is skewed towards the better off, the less a state redistributes.
Less redistribution leaves the advantage to grow, and Piketty shows how, from the national accounts rather than a game: where the return on capital outruns the growth of the economy, wealth concentrates unless it is taxed back, and the concentration of the nineteenth century was undone in the twentieth by wars and progressive taxation, and not by any change of heart.
Getting from a card table to a tax code takes three steps, and the evidence reaches two of them. The games show the belief forming, and show it changing how much the winner would redistribute between other people. Schakel and Mahler show what the better off want being enacted. Nobody has shown that what the better off want at the ballot box is the belief the games produce, rather than plain interest, which predicts the same vote. The games lasted an afternoon. No study has followed the winners into a lifetime of voting.
Schakel finds low incomes heard far less than high, and Mathisen, on 603 Norwegian issues over five decades, finds the poor with some sway on economic questions and no more.
What the poor come to believe about the system has a name in the literature, political efficacy: the belief that the system answers to people like oneself. Frederick Solt found, in more than a dozen cross-national surveys of the rich democracies, that higher inequality depresses political interest, political discussion and turnout among all but the most affluent, and that the effect grows as relative income falls. His reading is that where wealth concentrates, power concentrates, and the less affluent conclude that the issues on the table are not theirs and that voting is not worth the effort. Jan Rosset measured the belief directly in 13 western democracies in 2019: most people at every income say policy answers to the rich, and those who say so vote less, most of all on low incomes. Because every income shares the perception, Rosset concludes it cannot explain why the poor vote less than the rich.
The advantaged get a belief about themselves, that they deserved it, produced in a laboratory with the advantage dealt in front of them. The disadvantaged get a belief about the system, that it is not for them, measured in surveys and correlated with turnout. The losers of a rigged game have not been followed to the ballot box. Deffains’s below-median group blamed the task, which is the seed of it, but the games stop at the redistribution choice. So the step from inequality to the poor going quiet is real, and it rests on weaker evidence than the step from a rigged win to a story of desert.
Against Solt, Huijsmans, Rijken and Gaidyte, across 66 countries and half a million people, found inequality lowering everyone’s turnout and the gap between rich and poor voters narrowing rather than widening. If they are right, inequality does not push the poor out of the electorate faster than the rich, and the skew in turnout has some other cause.
The losers in the same games want more redistribution: Deffains’s below-median group chose more of it. The demand is there. That it is heard a little is a reading across Schakel and Mathisen rather than a finding either reports. So the disadvantaged do push, in two directions at once: towards more redistribution, where they are faintly heard, and away from the ballot box, where the pushing stops.
The slime mould, meanwhile, is doing what it did before the argument started. In 2008 Nakagaki blew cold dry air over a Physarum once an hour, three times, and it slowed each time. On the fourth hour, with no air, it slowed anyway. Nobody knows how it keeps time. Linnaeus had it right the first time. Chaos was the box for everything that would not go in a box. It is the only one in the whole system that has never needed correcting, since nothing put in it has yet agreed to be anything else. The slime mould has not been consulted.