Michael Levin

Evolution would take forever.

The reason it works, one of the reasons it works so well is because you do that, no worries, the mouth will find its way where it belongs, right?

So now you get to explore.

So what that means is that all of these mutations that otherwise would be deleterious are now neutral because the competency of the parts changes.

make up for all kinds of things.

So all the noise of development, all the variability in the environment, all these things, the competency of the parts makes up for it.

So that's all fantastic, right?

That's all great.

The only other thing to remember when we compare this to human efforts is this,

Every component has its own goals in various spaces, usually with very little regard for the welfare of the other levels.

So as a simple example, you know, you as a complex system, you will go out and you will do, you know, jujitsu or whatever.

You'll have some go.

You have to go rock climbing and scrape a bunch of cells off your hands.

And then you're happy as a system, right?

You come back and you've accomplished some goals and you're really happy.

Those cells are dead.

They're gone, right?

Did you think about those cells?

Not really, right?

You had some bruising.