Cognitive Cells: From Cellular Senomic Spheres to Earth’s Biosphere

Abstract Cells are central for life, starting some 3.7 billion years ago with the assembly of the first primordial cells in the primeval and prebiotic oceans of the young Earth’s environment. Details of this abiogenesis are still missing but since the first competent, self-reproductive cell emerged, life has been based on continuous cell divisions. Accordingly, all present cells can be traced directly to the very first cells. Our senomic concept of cell sentience based on bioelectromagnetic fields postulated that all cells are sentient and that life and sentience are coterminous. Archaea and bacteria are the most ancient cellular organisms and they still exhibit a unicellular lifestyle. Some two billion years after the emergence of life on Earth, eukaryotic cells were symbiotically assembled from archaeal and bacterial cells. Eukaryotic cells later coalesced to form true multicellular organisms in partnership with bacteria and archaea, forming holobionts, including fungi, plants, and animals. All organisms living presently are integrated into the Earth’s biosphere, which permeates all three major ecological habitats: the geosphere, hydrosphere, and the atmosphere. Coexistence of such vast assemblies of collaborating cells necessitates a highly elevated level of integration, which originates at the level of the senomic spheres of individual prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells across the whole of Earth’s biosphere corresponding to the hypothetical Gaia concept.