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325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the dynamics of the blood is very interesting. It's novel. I've never seen one of those. | 47:52.800 | 47:58.320 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | But you know, that's exactly what we're trying to half ass when we, when we judge judgment of | 47:58.320 | 48:03.920 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | beauty by facial symmetry and so on. That's a half assed assessment of exactly that. Because | 48:03.920 | 48:09.120 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | if your cells could not cooperate enough to keep your organism symmetrical, you know, | 48:09.120 | 48:13.760 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | you can make some inferences about what else is wrong, right? Like that's a very, you know, | 48:13.760 | 48:17.120 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | that's a very basic. Interesting. Yeah. So that in some deep sense, actually, that is what we're | 48:17.120 | 48:23.280 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | doing. We're trying to infer how health, we use the word healthy, but basically, how functional | 48:23.280 | 48:33.120 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | is this biological system I'm looking at so I can hook up with that one and make offspring? Yeah, | 48:33.120 | 48:41.120 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | yeah. Well, what kind of hardware might their genomics give me that that might be useful in | 48:41.120 | 48:45.360 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the future? I wonder why evolution didn't give us a higher resolution signal. Like why the whole | 48:45.360 | 48:50.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | peacock thing with the feathers? It doesn't seem, it's a very low bandwidth signal for | 48:50.720 | 48:58.160 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | sexual selection. I'm gonna, and I'm not an expert on this stuff, but on peacocks. Well, | 48:58.160 | 49:02.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | you know, but I'll take a stab at the reason. I think that it's because it's an arms race. You | 49:02.880 | 49:08.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | see, you don't want everybody to know everything about you. So I think that as much as, as much as, | 49:08.880 | 49:14.160 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | and in fact, there's another interesting part of this arms race, which is, if you think about this, | 49:14.160 | 49:19.680 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the most adaptive, evolvable system is one that has the most level of top down control, right? | 49:21.120 | 49:27.760 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | If it's really easy to say to a bunch of cells, make another finger versus, okay, here's 10,000 | 49:27.760 | 49:33.920 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | gene expression changes that you need to do to make it to change your finger, right? The system | 49:33.920 | 49:38.800 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | with good top down control that has memory and when we need to get back to that, by the way, | 49:38.800 | 49:42.320 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | that's a question I neglected to answer about where the memory is and so on. A system that uses | 49:42.320 | 49:48.080 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | all of that is really highly evolvable and that's fantastic. But guess what? It's also highly subject | 49:48.080 | 49:53.920 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | to hijacking by parasites, by cheaters of various kinds, by conspecifics. Like we found that, | 49:53.920 | 50:00.640 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | and then that goes back to the story of the pattern memory in these planaria, | 50:01.440 | 50:04.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | there's a bacterium that lives on these planaria. That bacterium has an input into how many heads | 50:04.880 | 50:09.840 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the worm is going to have because it's hijacks that control system and it's able to make a | 50:09.840 | 50:14.480 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | chemical that basically interfaces with the system that calculates how many heads you're | 50:14.480 | 50:18.480 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | supposed to have and they can make them have two heads. And so you can imagine that if you | 50:18.480 | 50:22.080 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | are two, so you want to be understandable for your own parts to understand each other, | 50:22.080 | 50:25.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | but you don't want to be too understandable because you'll be too easily controllable. | 50:25.520 | 50:28.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | And so I think that my guess is that that opposing pressure keeps us from being a super high | 50:28.880 | 50:36.640 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | bandwidth kind of thing where we can just look at somebody and know everything about them. | 50:36.640 | 50:40.240 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | So it's a kind of biological game of Texas hold them. You're showing some cards and you're hiding | 50:40.240 | 50:45.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | other cards and there's part of it and there's bluffing and there's all that. And then there's | 50:45.520 | 50:50.560 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | probably whole species that would do way too much bluffing. That's probably where peacocks fall. | 50:50.560 | 50:55.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | There's a book that I don't remember if I read or if I read summaries of the book, | 50:56.800 | 51:04.400 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | but it's about evolution of beauty and birds. Where is that from? Is that a book or does | 51:04.400 | 51:10.160 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Richard Dawkins talk about it? But basically there's some species start to like over select | 51:10.160 | 51:15.600 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | for beauty, not over select. They just some reason select for beauty. There is a case to be made. | 51:15.600 | 51:21.280 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Actually now I'm starting to remember, I think Darwin himself made a case that you can select | 51:21.280 | 51:27.200 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | based on beauty alone. There's a point where beauty doesn't represent some underlying biological | 51:27.200 | 51:35.680 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | truth. You start to select for beauty itself. And I think the deep question is there some evolutionary | 51:35.680 | 51:44.400 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | value to beauty, but it's an interesting kind of thought that can we deviate completely from | 51:44.400 | 51:53.760 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the deep biological truth to actually appreciate some kind of the summarization in itself. | 51:53.760 | 51:59.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Let me get back to memory because this is a really interesting idea. How do a collection of cells | 52:00.480 | 52:06.800 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | remember anything? How do biological systems remember anything? How is that akin to the kind | 52:07.600 | 52:13.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | of memory we think of humans as having within our big cognitive engine? | 52:13.520 | 52:17.920 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Yeah. One of the ways to start thinking about bioelectricity is to ask ourselves, where did | 52:17.920 | 52:24.240 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | neurons and all these cool tricks that the brain uses to run these amazing problem solving abilities | 52:25.200 | 52:32.320 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | on and basically an electrical network, right? Where did that come from? They didn't just evolve, | 52:32.320 | 52:36.400 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | you know, appear out of nowhere. It must have evolved from something. And what it evolved from | 52:36.400 | 52:40.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | was a much more ancient ability of cells to form networks to solve other kinds of problems. For | 52:40.720 | 52:46.320 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | example, to navigate more for space to control the body shape. And so all of the components | 52:46.320 | 52:51.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | of neurons, so ion channels, neurotransmitter machinery, electrical synapses, all this stuff | 52:52.320 | 52:58.320 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | is way older than brains, way older than neurons, in fact, older than multicellularity. And so | 52:58.320 | 53:03.600 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | it was already that even bacterial biofilms, there's some beautiful work from UCSD on brain | 53:03.600 | 53:09.120 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | like dynamics and bacterial biofilms. So evolution figured out very early on that electrical networks | 53:09.120 | 53:14.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | are amazing at having memories, at integrating information across distance, at different kinds | 53:14.880 | 53:19.120 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | of optimization tasks, you know, image recognition and so on, long before there were brains. | 53:19.120 | 53:23.760 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Can you actually just step back? We'll return to it. What is bioelectricity? What is biochemistry? | 53:24.400 | 53:30.160 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | What is, what are electrical networks? I think a lot of the biology community focuses on | 53:30.160 | 53:36.160 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the chemicals as the signaling mechanisms that make the whole thing work. You have, I think, | 53:36.160 | 53:45.840 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | to a large degree, uniquely, maybe you can correct me on that, have focused on the bioelectricity, | 53:47.200 | 53:53.600 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | which is using electricity for signaling. There's also probably mechanical. Sure, sure. Like knocking | 53:53.600 | 54:00.080 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | on the door. So what's the difference? And what's an electrical network? Yeah, so I want to make | 54:00.080 | 54:07.840 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | sure and kind of give credit where credit is due. So as far back as 1903, and probably late 1800s | 54:07.840 | 54:14.800 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | already, people were thinking about the importance of electrical phenomena in life. So I'm for sure | 54:14.800 | 54:20.560 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | not the first person to stress the importance of electricity. People, there were waves of research | 54:20.560 | 54:25.920 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | in the in the 30s, in the 40s, and then, again, in the kind of 70s, 80s, and 90s of sort of the | 54:25.920 | 54:33.600 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | pioneers of bioelectricity, who did some amazing work on all this, I think, I think what what | 54:33.600 | 54:37.520 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | we've done that's new, is to step away from this idea that, and I'll describe what what the | 54:37.520 | 54:43.040 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | bioelectricity is a step away from the idea that, well, here's another piece of physics that you | 54:43.040 | 54:46.800 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | need to keep track of to understand physiology and development. And to really start looking at this | 54:46.800 | 54:51.760 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | as saying, no, this is a privileged computational layer that gives you access to the actual | 54:51.760 | 54:57.360 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | cognition of the tissue of basal cognition. So, so merging that that developmental biophysics with | 54:57.360 | 55:02.160 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | ideas and cognition of computation, and so on, I think I think that's what we've done that's new. | 55:02.160 | 55:05.920 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | But people have been talking about bioelectricity for a really long time. And so I'll, so I'll | 55:05.920 | 55:09.840 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | define that. So what happens is that if you have, if you have a single cell, cell has a membrane, | 55:09.840 | 55:16.400 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | in that membrane are proteins called ion channels, and those proteins allow charged molecules, | 55:16.400 | 55:21.600 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | potassium, sodium, chloride, to go in and out under certain circumstances. And when there's | 55:21.600 | 55:27.280 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | an imbalance of of those ions, there becomes a voltage gradient across that membrane. And so | 55:27.280 | 55:33.200 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | all cells, all living cells try to hold a particular kind of voltage difference across | 55:33.200 | 55:38.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | the membrane, and they spend a lot of energy to do so. When you now now, so that's it, that's it, | 55:38.720 | 55:44.240 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | that's a single cell. When you have multiple cells, the cells sitting next to each other, | 55:44.240 | 55:48.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | they can communicate their voltage state to each other via a number of different ways. But one of | 55:48.720 | 55:53.200 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | them is this thing called a gap junction, which is basically like a little submarine hatch that | 55:53.200 | 55:56.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | just kind of docks, right? And the ions from one side can flow to the other side, and vice versa. | 55:56.880 | 56:01.440 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | So... | 56:02.160 | 56:02.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Isn't it incredible that this evolved? Isn't that wild? Because that didn't exist. | 56:02.720 | 56:08.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Correct. This had to be, this had to be evolved. | 56:09.600 | 56:11.440 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | It had to be invented. | 56:11.440 | 56:12.640 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | That's right. | 56:12.640 | 56:13.280 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Somebody invented electricity in the ocean. When did this get invented? | 56:13.280 | 56:17.440 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Yeah. So, I mean, it is incredible. The guy who discovered gap junctions, | 56:17.440 | 56:22.800 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Werner Loewenstein, I visited him. He was really old. | 56:22.800 | 56:25.360 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | A human being? | 56:25.360 | 56:26.720 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | He discovered them. | 56:26.720 | 56:27.360 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Because who really discovered them lived probably four billion years ago. | 56:27.360 | 56:32.480 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Good point. | 56:32.480 | 56:32.880 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | So you give credit where credit is due, I'm just saying. | 56:32.880 | 56:35.600 |
325 | Michael Levin | Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | He rediscovered gap junctions. But when I visited him in Woods Hole, maybe 20 years ago now, | 56:35.600 | 56:43.200 |