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 and we see, right, if we um so so I've had uh I've had a couple of papers now with um uh Lakshwin, uh Swisha and um
um Ben Hartle where we actually model what happens when you take seriously the idea that the layer between the genome and the phenotype is actually intelligent, meaning it's not just a complex mapping.
It well certainly not a linear mapping, but it's not even just a complex mapping.
It's actually a mapping that uh that that's a that's a that's a problem solving uh system.
And when you do that, evolution, the dynamics of evolution are quite different because what it ends up happening is um
What it ends up doing is by by being able to fix, as we see in embryos, you know, they're they're uh they're able to repair all sorts of weird things that happen to them.
Uh by doing that, it hides information from selection about how good what what was actually in the genome.
Because when you know, when selection sees a good embryo, well, was that good because your structural genome is good or because it was actually quite a mess, but but you fixed it along the way, right?
And so when that when that
happens, a lot of pressure gets taken off of the actual um uh genotype, but but all the uh the work tends to be done on the competency itself, on the problem solving capacity.
And if you take that all the way to its conclusion, which I think is what planaria have done, is basically because because of their um lack of Weissman's barrier in the in the asexual strains and the fact that they accumulate every mutation that doesn't kill does neoblast just spreads into the next uh you know into the
into the regenerative uh body.
Because the because the hardware is so unstable, they've basically put all their effort into creating an algorithm that will build a proper orm no matter what happens to the you know to the hardware.
And this is and and then the rest of us are sort of, you know, salamanders and then and then mammals and then C.
elegans, you know, we're sort of at different levels on that continuum.
How how seriously do you actually take your genome?
Right.
I think I think C.
elegans takes it extremely seriously.
I think planaria uh don't pay that much attention to it at all.
Showing 561–580 of 1,198 · page 29 of 60
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