Michael Levin
speaker
450 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Michael Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
you you you have some some mutations but the material tends to fix it
And then selection can't see the genome as well because the phenotype doesn't show evidence, you know, you fixed it.
And so when when selection can't tell whether your genome was great or actually your your competence was good, all the work of that evolutionary cycle starts being put into making the algorithm better.
And the more you do that, well, the harder it is to see the genome.
And so you've got this feedback loop.
It's this like positive feedback loop, where over and over again, what you're getting really good at.
Is doing something coherent even if the starting material and the starting information is different, degraded, uh, you know, unreadable, whatever.
And then and then that's how you end up with things like planaria that have a ridiculously noisy um uh you know uh genome that's um
uh mixaploid where every cell has a different number of chromosomes and and yet they're the ones that that have this like incredible cancer resistant, no, no aging, uh highly regenerative animal, even though, even though the genome is is is basically junk.
So yeah, I I I love the I love the the interpretation of of uh that that aspect of it, you know, uh how how to how to interpret that information.
Yeah.
Yeah, something something that uh that um we we wanted we recently uh uh did and it's this is this preprint will go up, I think this week, is um we made some xenobots and we stuck some neural cells in it, such that what what is the structure of a nervous system that doesn't have uh uh you know a selection uh a history of selection for a specific purpose?
So they're finding themselves in a completely new context, they're sitting extra cells, you know, that that are shouldn't be there.
What, you know, what are the nervous systems
And they're gonna look like.
And these things are incredibly plastic.
And because of this, because of the the material has this um.
uh ability to interpret and reinterpret the information, you get you get these really interesting um
Uh uh competitions between interpretations.
So one of my favorite examples is uh in the early embryo, one of the things that um tells the eyes where they should be, there's a particular bioelectrical pattern in the nascent face that has these spots to say this is where the eye goes.
Showing 261–280 of 450 · page 14 of 23
← Previous
Next →