Professor David Farrier

Racing totals.

Yes, just moving for new frontiers endlessly and causing destruction, you know, wherever they go.

And also getting to the point where because they are so unstoppable, their tadpoles have become cannibalistic.

Their tadpoles eat each other because nothing else eats them.

And so it's a perfect emblem in a way of capitalism and in its sort of self-devouring phase.

But cane toads are, if we look at it differently, if we think otherwise about the organism of the cane toad, then

actually, we get a whole other way of understanding how we could reorganize our economies as organisms, not machines.

Because one of the most astonishing things that I learned in writing this book was about the nature of intelligence, the nature of intelligence as an embodied phenomenon, that every cell in our bodies and in the bodies of any complex organism behaves in very similar manner to

neurons in the brain you know that cells will express preferences they will share information they'll retain information they'll they'll group together in some cases and make decisions they share stress yes slime molds tell us about the slime mold because that's quite a useful one i think well the slime mold is just a wonderful example of how diverse cognition is it was a famous experiment in um that placed a um oat flakes a food source for slime molds on a map of tokyo

key points in the city and then they dropped the slime mold on it and it just very organically worked out the most efficient route to these food sources that happened to map pretty much directly onto the map of the Tokyo subway system.

This slime mold, this organism we think has no real capacity for cognition or intelligent behavior

devise something that it took many, many humans and a great deal of resources to do.

And it did it.

But it's just one example of how diverse cognition is.

And the wonderful thing for me was that we can find examples in our

bodies of and in the bodies of an organism like the king told of what of collective intelligence michael lieven the developmental biologist whose ideas i'm kind of citing here are he says that all into living every living organism is the collective intelligence

And that for me was revolutionary.

I thought, well, that's a way of rethinking the cane toad.

And it's a way of rethinking our economies as well, because we think of the economy as an organism that is also a collective intelligence, not an individual entity, but this rich expression of cognition and collaboration going right the way down to the cellular level.

That's a wonderful model for rethinking what it means to grow, for rethinking our relationship with