Michael Levin: Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives

Moar people need to be talking about this guys work, a buddy clued me in to it last year. Creating new species without any genetic changes... it's huge. Not only has he discovered a new communication control channel in biology, machine learning is unlocking the commands to intelligently manipulate that channel at will. It's many times deeper this too, this is incredible work. Want those tree-grown steaks rather than a stew of muscle cells with no structure? This work is how you grow an intact cow muscle without the rest of the cow with ease. Want to tell those cancer cells using your body as a petrie dish to knock it off and to start working with the rest of your body again? This is a direct path towards that too. Comparing his 2020 ALife talk to another one published in 2021 he's still making progress: [this video] The mainstream of higher-ed biology is not yet fully on board and is still snickering at his work because he is an outsider, but his results are impressive enough that doubters will become irrelevant soon enough.

Oh, but the "organic" solutions do highly deterministic, extremely programmable computational work: 99.99999+% of newborns have 2 hands, 2 legs, and 1 head, and they all started development from a single cell [1]. It's just that the "organic" solutions are written in a 4+ billion year-old highly redundant, distributed, resilient, evolved language whereas our CPUs are not on the same phylogenetic tree. The quotation marks around organic are just there to point out that there is something wrong with the dichotomy organic (various pro/eu-karyotes from bacteria to humans)/inorganic (from thermostats to CPUs). [1] Michael Levin: Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives [this video]