Michael Levin

Yeah, the environment and also the laws of the universe.

I mean, the thing about the DNA is that once evolution discovers a certain kind of machine, that if the physical implementation is appropriate, it's sort of – and this is hard to talk about because we don't have a good vocabulary for this yet, but it's very –

kind of a platonic notion that if the machine is there, it pulls down interesting things that you do not have to evolve from scratch because the laws of physics give it to you for free.

So just as a really stupid example, if you're trying to evolve a particular triangle, you can evolve the first angle and you evolve the second angle, but you don't need to evolve the third.

You know what it is already.

Now, why do you know?

That's a gift for free from geometry in a particular space.

You know what that angle has to be.

And if you evolve an ion channel, which is ion channels are basically transistors, right?

They're voltage gated current conductances.

If you evolve that ion channel, you immediately get to use things like truth tables.

You get logic functions.

You don't have to evolve the logic function.

You don't have to evolve a truth table.

It doesn't have to be in the DNA.

You get it for free, right?

And the fact that if you have NAND gates, you can build anything you want.

You get that for free.

All you have to evolve is that first step, that first little machine that enables you to couple to those laws.

And there's laws of adhesion and many other things.