Michael Levin

Yeah, it's much more fluid.

It's much more complex.

You can imagine what's happening here.

Just imagine the evolution of an animal like this.

That multiscale, this goes back to this multiscale competency, right?

Imagine that you have an animal that...

That where it's, it's tissues have some degree of multi-scale competency.

So for example, if the, like, like we saw in the tadpole, you know, if you put an eye on its tail, they can still see out of that eye, right?

That the, you know, there's all, there's incredible plasticity.

So if you have an animal and it comes up for selection and the fitness is quite good.

evolution doesn't know whether the fitness is good because the genome was awesome or because the genome was kind of junky, but the competency made up for it, right?

And things kind of ended up good.

So what that means is that the more competency you have, the harder it is for selection to pick the best genomes.

It hides information, right?

And so that means that, so what happens, you know, evolution basically starts, all the hard work is being done to increase the competency,

because it's harder and harder to see the genomes and so i think in planaria what happened is that there's this runaway phenomenon where all the effort went into the algorithm such that we know you got a crappy genome we can't keep we can't clean up the genome we can't keep track of it so what what's going to happen is what survives are the algorithms that can create a great worm no matter what the genome is so everything went into the algorithm and which which of course then reduces the pressure on keeping a you know keeping a clean genome

So this idea of, right, and different animals have this to different levels, but this idea of putting energy into an algorithm that does not overtrain on priors, right?

It can't assume.

I mean, I think biology is this way in general.

Evolution doesn't take the past too seriously because it makes these basically problem-solving machines as opposed to like exactly what, you know, to deal with exactly what happened last time.