For the Human Flower to Grow, It Has Needed the Soil of the Non-Human: Epistemic Justice and the Basal Cognition Approach
Francisco Javier Navarro Prieto, UAM
2025
We, humans, are exceptional beings. In a world that began with nothing more than hydrogen atoms, Hamlet, the poems of Keats, the music of Liszt, and the paintings of Friedrich now exist because of our actions. Think of even more complex achievements that go beyond individual genius: a justice system, a city, a public transportation network. All of them require not only talent, but also long-term cooperation, planning, and learning. We are, as a species, in love with ourselves. History, Literature, Philosophy—these are just different names for our fascination with our own actions. We read novels written for others, we inhabit buildings constructed by others, and we talk endlessly in cafés about what it all means.
Western thought has long tried to explain what makes us so special. Descartes famously proposed that we are composed of a unique, immaterial substance—res cogitans—that allows us to think, unlike everything else in nature. This idea introduced a deep ontological divide: we, humans, are thinking beings; the rest of nature is just matter.
This human exceptionalism didn’t vanish with Descartes—it persists in our modern scientific practices. In psychology and biology, cognition is still often defined starting with the human case. A brain, or at least a nervous system, is taken as a prerequisite. The typical method is top-down: define cognition using humans as the model, and then go down the evolutionary tree checking who meets the criteria. The result is clear: only a few of us—some animals—are considered true cognizers, so the rest must be, as Descartes once claimed, mere machines at our disposal —beings to which we owe nothing.
But what if we flip the method? What if, instead of starting from the top, we start from the bottom? What if we ask: how did cognition begin, and how has it evolved? This lies at the heart of the recently emerging “basal cognition” research program: the idea that cognition is not a miraculous trait that emerged all at once with humans or animals, but rather a complex evolutionary process with deep roots. The goal is to trace continuities between us and other life forms, from crows and dolphins to plants, fungi, and bacteria.
Now, a fair question comes to mind: can we really trace such continuity without being metaphorical? Instead of answering directly, let me tell you a story. Take, for example, learning and memory, two processes essential for any form of cognition.
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum on a stored oak post. Photograph by Ian Alexander. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.
It is now well established that forms of learning like habituation and sensitization exist even in non-neural organisms, including bacteria, slime moulds, and plants. Habituation is the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli; sensitization is the mirror image—an amplified response following a strong or significant stimulus. These are not metaphors. They are real, experimentally demonstrated phenomena, mediated by biological mechanisms such as epigenetic modifications, metabolic feedback loops, and molecular templates that preserve information about past experiences.
This kind of memory—cellular, molecular, epigenetic—is not erased with the appearance of neurons. On the contrary, when neurons first emerged in multicellular animals, they recruited these pre-existing memory mechanisms into a new architecture. Epigenetic processes continue to play a central role in long-term plasticity, helping to stabilize and modulate synaptic changes during learning. Neural memory doesn’t replace molecular memory—it builds upon it, combining intracellular and intercellular communication in more flexible and scalable ways.
In this light, even a bacterium exposed repeatedly to a harmless chemical can “learn” to ignore it. A slime mould (see the image above to meet one of them) can learn that a particular path is not dangerous. These are not simplistic versions of cognition—they are its evolutionary roots. From these modest beginnings, cognition becomes increasingly sophisticated as evolution proceeds. With the appearance of nervous systems, a second memory system arises: synaptic memory. Now learning can happen not only within cells, but between them —through changes in synaptic connections and patterns of intercellular communication. This enabled faster, more flexible responses. Early neural animals like cnidarians exhibit enhanced habituation and sensitization, expanding the possibilities for behavioral adaptation.
Then comes the second major transition: the emergence of centralized nervous systems capable of associative learning—the ability to form and retain links between specific stimuli and behavioral responses. In this new architecture, memories are encoded both within individual neurons and across the connections between them. Neural circuits begin to support more complex forms of plasticity, where repeated patterns of activation lead to lasting changes in how signals are processed and transmitted. In organisms like Caenorhabditis elegans and Aplysia, we find clear evidence of both classical and operant conditioning, grounded in changes at the molecular level within neurons—such as altered gene expression, modulation of neurotransmitter release, and synaptic strengthening.
A final leap—though not a break—brings us to animals capable of unlimited associative learning. These are beings who can discriminate novel patterns, hold representations over time, and select among imagined scenarios. With the emergence of brain regions specialized for value assessment (orbitofrontal cortex and basal ganglia), memory storage (hippocampus and medial temporal lobe), and sensorimotor integration (parietal cortex and cerebellum) we get imagination, planning, and even a rudimentary form of self-monitoring.
From here, symbolic language and cultural learning become possible—not as sudden miracles, but as the natural extension of increasingly complex forms of learning. Once animals can form internal representations of the world, hold them in working memory, and simulate different actions before carrying them out, they are no longer bound to the immediate present. They can plan, anticipate, imagine. The next evolutionary step is to externalize those internal representations: to share what is imagined with others. Symbolic language emerges as a tool for doing precisely that—a way to transmit experiences, plans, emotions, and knowledge not through genes or imitation alone, but through signs with shared meanings. Once this is in place, the learning of one generation can become the foundation for the next. This is cumulative cultural evolution. From this horizon, the seemingly ineffable becomes intelligible: we get poetry, science, and politics. We get Hamlet and Keats—not because we invented cognition, but because we inherited and extended it in uniquely human ways.
So yes, we can trace a continuity—from the earliest molecular traces of memory in bacteria, to the epigenetic loops in slime moulds, to the synaptic memory of animals, to the poems of Keats. The gap is not a chasm; it is a climb—layer by layer, mechanism by mechanism, each innovation building upon ancient scaffolds. Crucially, this continuity is not limited to memory: a growing scientific field—spanning comparative and basal cognition—is uncovering similar continuities in perception, decision-making, learning, attention, and even problem-solving across the tree of life.
And this continuity matters. Not just for science, but for justice. It means resisting the old habit of drawing an abyss between humans and the rest of life—and instead, tracing the thread of cognition as it weaves through cells, bodies, and minds across evolutionary time. The basal cognition approach reminds us of two things—both simple and urgent. First, that we are not exceptions: we are not the only ones striving to persist through cognitive means, whether simple or complex. And second, that we are deeply interdependent: for the human flower to grow, it has needed the soil of the non-human. This is, of course, an exercise in epistemic justice—one that also carries a profound ethical orientation. The first step toward survival is recognizing that we cannot do without what has nurtured us.
Our ecological crisis is, at root, an imaginative one. We have told ourselves a story in which we are apart from nature, not part of it. This narrative has served to justify both economic over-exploitation and epistemic neglect. But a science of cognition that embraces continuity might help us rewrite that story. This exercise is not optional—especially in the sadly named Anthropocene, the epoch of man.
Further readings and resources:
Ginsburg, S., & Jablonka, E. (2019). The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11006.001.0001
Ginsburg, S., & Jablonka, E. (2021). Evolutionary transitions in learning and cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, 376(1821), 20190766. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0766
Lyon, P., Keijzer, F., Arendt, D., & Levin, M. (2021). Reframing cognition: Getting down to biological basics. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 376(1820), 20190750. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0750
Reid, C. R. (2023). Thoughts from the forest floor: a review of cognition in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Animal Cognition, 26(6), 1783–1797. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01782-1
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