Michael Levin

When you say, hey, why is this the way it is?

It's because this is how symmetry symmetries or topology or whatever.

Biology are the things that are enabled by those.

They're free lunches.

They're biology exploits these kinds of truths.

And really, it enables biology and evolution to do amazing things without having to pay for it.

I think there's a lot of free lunches going on here.

And so I show you a xenobot or an anthropod, and I say, hey, look, here are some amazing things they're doing that tissue has never done before in their history.

You say, first of all, where did that come from?

And when did we pay the computational cost for it?

Because we know when we pay the computational cost to design a frog or a human, it was for the eons that the genome was bashing against the environment getting selected, right?

So you pay the computational cost of that.

There's never been any anthrobots.

There's never been any xenobots.

When do we pay the computational cost for designing kinematic self-replication and, you know, all these things that they're able to do?

So there's two things people say.

One is, well, it's sort of you got it at the same time that they were being selected to be good humans and good frogs.

Now, the problem with that is it kind of undermines the point of evolution.

The point of evolutionary theory was to have a very tight specificity between what how you are now and the history of selection that got you here.

Right.