Michael Levin

And here's an example of that.

This was done, this was an old experiment going back to the 40s, but basically, imagine, it's a newt, a salamander, and it's got these little tubules that go to the kidneys, right, this little tube.

Take a cross-section of that tube, you see 8 to 10 cells that have cooperated to make this little tube and cross-section, right?

So one amazing thing you can do is you can mess with the very early cell division to make the cells gigantic, bigger.

You can make them different sizes.

You can force them to be different sizes.

So if you make the cells different sizes, the whole nude is still the same size.

So if you take a cross-section through that tubule, instead of 8 to 10 cells, you might have 4 or 5, or you might have 3, until...

You make the cell so enormous that one single cell wraps around itself

And gives you that same large-scale structure with a completely different molecular mechanism.

So now instead of cell-to-cell communication to make a tubule, instead of that, it's one cell using the cytoskeleton to bend itself around.

So think about what that means.

In the service of a large-scale, talk about top-down control, right?

In the service of a large-scale anatomical feature, different molecular mechanisms get called up.

So now, think about this.

You're a nude cell and trying to make an embryo.

If you had a fixed idea of who was supposed to do what, you'd be screwed because now your cells are gigantic.

Nothing would work.

There's an incredible tolerance for changes in the size of the parts and the amount of DNA in those parts, all sorts of stuff.

The life is highly interoperable.