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.
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
I'm gonna give you just one example because time is short.
I'm gonna give you just one example of the kind of problem solving I meet.
So this is a tadpole uh of the frog Xenopus lavis.
You've got the brain here, here's some nostrils, here's the mouth, these are the eyes, and this is the gut.
And so these tadpoles have to become frogs.
And in order for a tadpole to become a frog, it has to rearrange its face.
So the eyes have to move, the mouth has to move, the nostrils, everything has to change.
And you might think that this is a hardwired process, that somehow the genetics uh specifies that every uh organ moves in the correct uh distance, the correct uh direction.
And then you get your frog.
Well, we decided to test this because anytime uh you're gonna make a uh claim about uh the level of intelligence of something, you have to do experiments.
You cannot just assume.
So we decided to test that.
We made so-called Picasso tadpoles where everything is scrambled.
So the eyes on top of the head, the mouth is off to the side here, everything is is is mixed up, like a kind of like a Mr.
Potato Head doll.
Everything is mixed up.
And then what we found is something amazing that these these animals give rise to pretty normal frogs.
And what we found is something amazing that these these animals give rise to pretty normal frogs.
And that's because these uh these organs don't just move the right uh distance in the right direction, because then they would be wrong.
they actually move uh in whatever way is needed through novel paths to get to where they're going and they make a correct frog phase.
Showing 61–80 of 1,198 · page 4 of 60
← Previous
Next →