"I see this meta-intelligence as a behaviour honed and skilled through purely random processes and mutations until it was right."
I was referring to the following, Greg. It's possible that it is random, but doesn't seem to be any more random than human-type functioning.
"Looking closely for the first time at intact bacterial microcities, scientists are amazed to see them packed as tightly as our own urban centers, but with a decidedly futuristic look. Towers of spheres and cone- or mushroom-shaped skyscrapers soar 100 to 200 micrometers upward from a base of dense sticky sugars, other big molecules and water, all collectively produced by the bacterial inhabitants. In these cities, different strains of bacteria with different enzymes help each other exploit food supplies that no one strain can break down alone, and all of them together build the city's infrastructure. The cities are laced with intricate channels connecting the buildings to circulate water, nutrients, enzymes, oxygen and recyclable wastes. Their diverse inhabitants live in different microneighborhoods and glide, motor or swim along roadways and canals. The more food is available, the denser the populations become. Researcher Bill Keevil in England, making videos of these cityscapes, says of one, 'It looks like Manhattan when you fly over it.'
In addition to rearranging Earth's crust, creating an atmosphere, devising urban lifestyles and creating the first worldwide web, bacteria invented other amazing technologies. Some produced polyester, though biodegradable; others harnessed solar energy as photosynthesis, permitting the making of food when it became scarce; still others invented the electric motor for locomotion -- -a disk with flagellum attached, rotating in a magnetic field, complete with ball bearings, not to mention the atomic pile, probably to raise local temperatures. Seeing these startling parallels to human lifestyles and inventions makes us see evolution fractally. In fact, when I fly over human cities, making them appear small, I see them as cells spread over a substrate, or as bacterial colonies."
http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/capetown.html