Bacterial Agency Claim Grading Register

PROBLEM: Bacteria demonstrably sense, move, communicate, and coordinate: chemotaxis, quorum sensing, biofilm formation, and horizontal gene transfer are all documented. From those facts, some writers — including Noble, who speaks of cellular agency and purposiveness — draw a further claim: that bacteria possess a form of agency or even consciousness. That further claim is UNVERIFIED: there is no scientific consensus that bacteria are conscious, and no experiment has settled it. The problem is that the documented facts and the unverified interpretation are routinely presented together, so audiences cannot tell where the science ends and the philosophy begins.

SOLUTION: A bacterial agency claim grading register: every claim about bacterial agency, purposiveness, or consciousness logged with the documented facts it rests on, the interpretive leap it makes, and a grade — DOCUMENTED for the mechanism, UNVERIFIED for the consciousness claim — so the line between what bacteria demonstrably do and what they are claimed to experience is drawn in the record, every time.

EVIDENCE BASIS: DOCUMENTED — chemotaxis, quorum sensing, biofilm coordination (sources in AB-01–AB-03). UNVERIFIED — bacterial consciousness; no consensus, no decisive experiment. The register exists to keep those two categories separate.