Michael Levin

Imagine you were shrunk down to the scale of a single cell.

And you were in the middle of an embryo and you were looking around at what's going on.

And the cells running around, some cells are dying.

Every time you look, it's kind of a different number of cells for most organisms and so on.

I think that if you didn't know what embryonic development was, you would have no clue that what you're seeing is always going to make the same thing.

Never mind knowing what that is.

Never mind being able to say, even with full genomic information, being able to say, what the hell are they building?

We have no way to do that.

But just even to guess that, wow, the outcome of all this activity is,

It's always going to build the same thing.

Yeah, except for cases like the Xenobots, when you give them a different environment, they come up with a different way to be adaptive in that environment.

But overall, I mean, so I think to kind of summarize it, I think what Evolution is really good at is creating hardware that has a very stable baseline mode, meaning that left to its own devices, it's very good at doing the same thing.

But it has a bunch of problem-solving capacity such that if any assumptions don't hold, if your cells are a weird size or you get the wrong number of cells or there's somebody stuck an electrode halfway through the body, whatever, it will still get most of what it needs to do done.

Yeah.

I mean, look, there's no getting away from the fact that the human brain allows us to do things that we could not do without it.

Yeah, no, this is true.

And so, you know, my goal is not, no, you're right.

Everybody has a role.

There are more than enough people who are cheerleading the brain, right?

So I don't feel like nothing I say is going to reduce people's excitement about the human brain.