Is this logical?

Humanism
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Bonnie Bassler proposes that all communication is ultimately traceable to bacterial ability for chemical communication.
Was that in her TED talk? I don't see anything she's published that isn't a scientific paper.
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lausten said; I don’t see anything she’s published that isn’t a scientific paper.
Do you mean "she has published that is a scientific paper" ? I believe her qualifications do establish some scientific weight to what she proposes . Moreover, she is not just talking about theory, but talks about experimental evidence of what she and her co-workers have "established" as true.
Bonnie Bassler, International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, and molecular biologist at Princeton University, is known as “the Bacteria Whisperer.” She has discovered how bacteria talk to one another; a process called “quorum sensing,” which allows bacteria to work together and control bacterial virulence. She works on ways to interfere with quorum sensing, which has ignited a flurry of new medical and drug research.
If we learn to communicate chemically with virulent or symbiotic bacteria, this opens a whole new area of controlling bacterial behavior, without the need to kill the organisms and thereby help in natural selection of immune strains.
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I’m not questioning her qualifications, I’m asking for something I could comprehend. Scientific papers usually have terms I’m NOT familiar with.

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lausten said; I’m not questioning her qualifications, I’m asking for something I could comprehend.
What is there that is incomprehensible? That bacteria can chemically communicate at a purely physical level? As Bassler observes, this ability may well be the proto-model for all hive mind behaviors. Quorum Sensing was a new term to me until recently.

What surprises me is that this seems to be a fairly new area of investigation into anti-bacterial solutions, other than just trying to chemically kill the critters and thereby promoting resistant strains.

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What is there that is incomprehensible?
In general, Gram-negative bacteria use acylated homoserine lactones as autoinducers, and Gram-positive bacteria use processed oligo-peptides to communicate.
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lausten said; In general, Gram-negative bacteria use acylated homoserine lactones as autoinducers, and Gram-positive bacteria use processed oligo-peptides to communicate.
Why should that confuse you? In China people speak Chinese, blind read through Braille, scentists speak through mathematics, computers speak through binary code, Morse speaks through long-short coded words., the Mayfly communicates through spreading pheromones.

Seems that any specific communicable ability can be used for information sharing, if that is of benefit to the species.

Bonnie Bassler even observed that bacteria are multilingual and have both an intra-species and inter-species language. It’s just that different chemical “words” (potentials) evoke a different chemical reaction in the various species.

And as you observed it is different species of bacteria that use different chemicals to communicate intra-species, apparently in addition to a second language that appears to be inter-species. Bassler mentioned a commonly shared Esperanto.

And let’s not forget that these languages do not offer any form of sophisticated or abstract information. These are purely chemical action<–>reaction responses.