Michael Levin
speaker
1,198 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Michael Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the cells are very competent at doing that.
The material, as I was pointing out, is not only competent to receive low information content stimuli and then have a very complex downstream response.
Uh, but also it does this cool thing that other collective intelligences do.
For example, ants, when ants come
come along a a piece of food that's too big for them to move, what do they uh what do they do?
They they recruit other members of the uh of the community.
Well, these cells do the same thing.
If we inject uh a few cells, they can tell there's not enough of them to build an eye.
So what do they do?
They recruit a bunch of cells from the environment that we did not inject at all.
So so there's the ability for the material to scale itself to the um available uh to the to the to the message that uh that they receive.
And just to point out, if anybody is interested in in plants, um this is this is another great example of um the plasticity of life.
You you might
Might think that the um the oak genome encodes for this shape, because this is what you see most of the time.
These acorns give rise to exactly this shape, this flat green thing.
But along comes this um non-human bioengineer, uh, this wasp, which is a parasite which puts down some signals for the plant cells and it hacks them.
It hacks the morphogenesis exactly the way that that I've been showing you that we can hack um.
The morphogenetic outcomes in animals.
And it causes these plant cells to build this incredible spiky round thing, or even or even this stuff.
So these are these are galls.
Showing 241–260 of 1,198 · page 13 of 60
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