A bacteria may have “memory” and still not have cognition. In this case “memory” would be a molecular state that predisposed the cell to a particular action.
The “purpose” behind the bacteria increasing its mutation rate by expression of a different type of DNA polymerase that is error prone is increased survival of progeny. Those bacterial populations with this ability survived so much better than their cohorts without it, that this is a common ability among bacteria.
Thus my point is reinforced about “purpose” and “randomness”. There is a purpose to the actions of the bacteria, even without cognition, and its purpose is to increase the random changes within its genome to generate an answer to the stress by utilization of natural selection of randomly generated genetic variation.
To me, allmendream, if you are trying to contort "purpose" so to include non-cognitive events, you are destroying the very idea of "purpose." Any purposive activity is a willed activity. An exercise of will depends on a rational appraisal — that is, a cognitive appraisal — of various opportunities/threats and a decisive choice about how to respond to them in an optimal way. And if there is a will, there is an agent whose will it is. Be it a bacterium, an amoeba, a man, or God Himself.
A good deal of the problem with speaking to persons of your conviction is you guys are so horrifically sloppy when it comes to basic language usage, not to mention epistemological rigor.
For example, you're happy to speak of "purpose" in nature if it involves a bacterium blindly increasing its survival value by randomly mutating as furiously as possible to overcome "negative messages" from the external environment.
But what signal triggered this activity? How did the beastie recognize then process the signal; i.e., get the message? How did the beastie then understand what to do with the message?
You suggest that each and every one of these questions is irrelevant because, as every good Darwinist knows, Nature has only apparent "purposes" (i.e., not real) purposes — and "apparent purpose" is only mentioned when convenient for (incoherent) discussion purposes. Your doctrine seemingly attests to the conviction that Nature cannot really/does not have/never will have any purposes at all. She's not only "blind," but STUPID.
And so the human mind, attempting to explore this hypothetical stupidity, is supposed to extract, by means of human reason, the laws of what, on your presentation, is totally unlawful in the first place.
Jeepers, if that isn't a good description of nihilist expectation, I don't know what is.
Anyhoot, I expect you think the evolution of life is a bottom-up process and a random one at that which, for all its randomness, somehow results in an ordered biota and an ordered universe as well.
Because to me it is so clear that "order" does not arise in a "random" system without an intelligent guide, let me offer a different perspective for your reflection if I may:
Depending on the direction in which one reads the next sentence, intelligence is a fractal property or/and an emergent property: ...Intelligent ecologies contain intelligent populations,which contain intelligent organisms, which contain intelligent cells, which contain intelligent compartments, which contain...and so forth. — G. Albrecht-Buehler, Cell Intelligence.And what is "random" anyway, but a term admitting that some things are unpredictable because we do not yet understand their causes/mechanisms....
Just some food for thought my friend. Thanks so much for writing!