Episode 105: Michael Levin’s Unseen World of Cell Cognition

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Transcript

[00:00:00]  Blue: This week on the Theory of Anything podcast, Burr speaks about the work of Michael Levin, who is a biologist known for his work on cell cognition, or the idea that electrical signals between cells influence the formation of biological systems. His work has potentially massive implications for cancer research and many other fields. He is also a prominent figure promoting third -way evolution that seeks to expand evolutionary theory beyond the alleged reductionism of a gene -centric or neo -Darwinian approach. Presumably, these bioelectric effects could be considered a branch of epigenetics. He is, I should add, kind of an out -there guy, even by the standards of some of the thinkers we discuss on this podcast. Of course, this is a podcast that deals without their theories, C. Frank Tipler. And Bruce does an excellent job exploring his work. I hope you all enjoy this. Welcome to Theory of Anything podcast, hey Peter. Hey Bruce, how are you doing?

[00:01:14]  Red: Well, I’m doing okay. I’ve had the flu, so I can’t exactly say I’m doing great.

[00:01:21]  Blue: Okay,

[00:01:22]  Red: well,

[00:01:23]  Blue: I’m sorry to hear that.

[00:01:24]  Red: Hopefully, your editing skills will remove my constant coughing. But it’s been a lot worse and I’m drugged to within an inch of my life, you know.

[00:01:34]  Blue: Okay. Well, you sound fine so far, so.

[00:01:37]  Red: It’s, the bad parts passed. It was really bad for a few days. But one of the worst sicknesses I’ve had in a long time.

[00:01:45]  Blue: Oh, Jesus. My

[00:01:46]  Red: wife points out that I just, like, never get sick.

[00:01:48]  Blue: Yeah.

[00:01:49]  Red: And so to get hit so hard and it was really weird and like, I had a hard time. Like when you have the flu, it’s hard to like, drag yourself into work because you’re in, you have like body aches and like chills and so yeah, it was everything. So I guess it could be COVID. I don’t know for sure if it’s the flu, but those have very similar symptoms. Well, all right. Well, today we’re going to talk about Michael Levin’s agentic approach to evolution or also known as do scientists misunderstand evolution? You had maybe wanted to make some comments about the episodes up to this point.

[00:02:31]  Blue: While I’m at the edge of my seat in terms of, I mean, this is a really, this, this, what I think, what at least I tentatively titled the last episode or two episodes ago, the neo -Darwinism versus post -Darwinism debate. It’s not something that in all my life until very recently, I’d ever even heard of to be really honest. But you know, I can’t tell if I truly can’t tell if we’re on to like one of the most interesting debates that no one knows about or if we’re talking about something completely pedantic that 99 % of the biologists would just scoff. I

[00:03:11]  Red: am going to take a definitive stance on that question. Okay.

[00:03:15]  Blue: Oh, good.

[00:03:16]  Red: And I haven’t up to this point. I’ve been, I mean, this is typical me. I’m doing my best to represent each side. I’m trying very hard. I started with James Shapiro’s viewpoint. I then went to Zach Hancock’s. I found a lot to like with both. I in general would say I actually think Zach Hancock did a better job than James Shapiro. I don’t really like Dennis Noble’s books very much. I find them problematic.

[00:03:46]  Blue: Yeah. You’ve been, what would you say, throwing some shade there? Yeah,

[00:03:50]  Red: definitely. Despite all that, we’re going to use Michael Levin and his research program

[00:03:59]  Blue: as the ultimately the deciding factor in this debate.

[00:04:04]  Red: And I think it defines things, he defines things in such a way that we can come up with a definitive answer to the question.

[00:04:12]  Blue: Okay.

[00:04:13]  Red: By asking the right question. He’s going to explain what the right question is.

[00:04:16]  Blue: Okay. Well, a rare unambiguous answer without qualifications. Yes. I know, I know where you stand there.

[00:04:28]  Red: Okay. So just a review. Two episodes ago, we went over James Shapiro’s arguments that there was something wrong with, quote, neodarwinism or modern synthesis. He treats those two terms as interchangeable. Shapiro argued the following. He argued that gradualism is incorrect. Evolution often takes huge single generation steps. For example, hybridization new species formed within a single generation due to interbreeding or symbiogenesis formation of the first eukaryotes would be the kind of gold standard of example of this. That is cells with a nucleus. Eukaryotes would be cells with a nucleus. That that happened in a single generation by two organisms fusing together. That’s apparently well accepted at this point. He argues against gene centricism. He says it’s incorrect. He says evolution relies on natural genetic engineering or NGE and that the genes know how the organism knows how to read and write to DNA and uses it as a data store and then utilizes sequences by moving them around in the genome or even spreading them horizontally. Here’s a quote from Dennis Noble that’s similar from his book the music of life page 21. The logic of successful systems that win in the competition for survival lies in the system not in the genes. It is the system organisms that live or die not genes. So this is this. I think captures really what the third way. Shapiro and nobles are saying what their real critique is one question I asked though was even if Shapiro was right would this really mean that neo Darwinism and modern synthesis was incorrect. For example would neo Darwinists really see hybridization or symbiogenesis as somehow at odds with current theory and our answer was no they really wouldn’t.

[00:06:28]  Blue: So I was trying to explain this to my bumble day last night not gonna lie and I what I said I explained what neo Darwinism is. I think I did a pretty good job there. I mean I don’t think she’d ever heard of that but which is fine. I mean but people have their own interests which describing it is something that a gene centric view on life our bodies are basically tools for our genes to replicate themselves is the best conception of life and then I describe trying to describe the post Darwinism view on life. Meaning as genes were just sort of one piece of the puzzle. It’s the whole body you know replicating itself through various right mechanisms some of which are more or less controversial I she’d heard of epigenetics for sure right. I don’t even I’m not even like fully aware of all the implications of what epigenetics is maybe you can define that Bruce what is in the context of this conversation what is epic epigenetics in

[00:07:44]  Red: the previous episode I actually pulled the definitions from the actual researchers. Oh

[00:07:49]  Blue: you did OK that’s right. I haven’t edited that one yet so

[00:07:52]  Red: there’s actually two definitions and they’re not the same things that Hancock pointed out was that has had met different things over time

[00:08:02]  Blue: fair enough I kind of I kind of got that yeah that’s right.

[00:08:06]  Red: So one of them is just plasticity OK the idea that different genes manifest in different ways depending on the environment so that could be considered epigenetics. That’s not generally how we would think of epigenetics epigenetics would generally generally be thought of as some form of inheritance that wasn’t through DNA.

[00:08:27]  Blue: So I was thinking like maybe the mom is stressed out while the baby’s in the womb that’s right that’s the kind of thing I had in mind that’s

[00:08:34]  Red: and that’s that’s what I think it normally means today right.

[00:08:38]  Blue: That’s not its

[00:08:38]  Red: original meaning the what the first one is the original meaning but over time it became this other thing right so it is non DNA inheritance basically OK that exists OK

[00:08:51]  Blue: so that’s kind of that’s kind of really that the whole core of the argument then is an epigenetics versus genetics thing or maybe only genetics versus both working together.

[00:09:07]  Red: Yeah so you know how would a neo Darwinist look at epigenetics do they see it as at odds with neo Darwinism they don’t that’s really what we came away with the Hancock episode

[00:09:19]  Blue: OK and

[00:09:20]  Red: I think that’s this is the first problem we’ve bumped into is that you’ve got this this idea I mean you kind of pitched it as neo Darwinism versus post Darwinism but you’re taking the point of view of noble and Shapiro whether you realize it or not right like that’s the ways they would put it it isn’t the way Hancock would put it OK and they would say no neo Darwinism entirely encompasses it’s it’s about the price equations it’s it’s got nothing to do with genes it’s just inheritance of material of some some sort so we don’t care if it’s epigenetics or genetics and it’s still neo Darwinism and that’s what they would say so they would argue that there’s no actual conflict even with epigenetics so now I pointed out that these counter examples that we’ve talked about they do surprise me right because they do break the way evolution was taught in schools to me or even at like the college level and college biology 101 or whatever right and so you’ve got this weird thing where I’ve got Hancock who would say not just Hancock Jerry coin says exactly the same thing I watched the debate between noble and Dawkins Dawkins essentially says exactly the same thing OK to him it’s like I don’t even see how this is at odds with neo Darwinism and that’s that’s kind of their view is that yes you’re raising all these things but none of this is actually at odds with neo Darwinism and that’s the stance they took OK he

[00:10:57]  Blue: didn’t Dawkins really didn’t dispute from what I recall at least that many of the details of what noble was talking about right.

[00:11:05]  Red: Right. He just doesn’t think it’s that important.

[00:11:07]  Blue: Fair enough.

[00:11:08]  Red: Yeah.

[00:11:09]  Blue: OK.

[00:11:10]  Red: So I think what we’ve what’s going on here is that you’ve kind of got the actual theory of neo Darwinism which would be based on the gene neutral price equations according to Hancock and then you’ve got a whole body of philosophical commitments built around it that aren’t actually part of the theory but are so well accepted and so much of how we teach it and how we explain it that it’s very difficult to break away between what’s actually part of the theory and what’s actually not part of the theory. So one episode ago I went over evolutionary biologists Zach Hancock’s criticisms of Dennis noble and James Shapiro is from his YouTube video Dennis noble is wrong about evolution. Zach’s counter argument could be summarized as noble and Shapiro don’t really understand modern theory of biological evolution. The true modern theory is rooted in the non gene centric price equations. Once you realize that every supposed counter example they raise actually fits nicely into the current modern understanding of neo Darwinism. Now I ended up agreeing with Hancock in our previous episode in general I think that the gene neutral price equations are a much better way to understand modern evolutionary theory than say the selfish gene theory which Hancock downplayed quite a bit and really did not think that that’s what neo Darwinism was. Having said that I had never you know heard of the price equations prior to watching Hancock’s video like somehow the central principles of evolution had entirely escaped my education and I don’t know what to make of that.

[00:12:57]  Red: I mean it’s kind of like there’s an actual sort of issue here and yet I kind of also agree with Hancock that really none of these examples we’re raising are truly at odds with the strongest form of neo Darwinism and I also I agree that we’ll never actually see a return to Lamarckism despite what Dennis Noble says unless we’re defining Lamarckism in a way so squishy that it can be described by the price equations and thus is really just a traditional form of variation in selection. So possibly not through genetic inheritance though because the price equations do not care if it’s genetic inheritance or not they will accept epigenetics just fine as part of inheritance. Now Hancock did basically admit that epigenetics are real that there is non non DNA inheritance but he argued that it wasn’t a very except in plants that it wasn’t a very strong process and that it can’t have big long term effects. So this might be something that noble would try to argue with him in fact he does try to argue that with Dawkins in the debate that they had right is that he thinks that the the impacts going to be a lot more than than what we think. Still I mean based on experiments done so far epigenetics only last for about three generations and then they vanish. So they probably don’t have as strong they’re not as charmed as Dawkins would put this compared to DNA. So I can understand that even if we’re accepting epigenetics as valid as part of neo Darwinism I can see why that it still ends up having the strong genetic centricism that kind of grows out of it.

[00:14:56]  Red: So here is from Hancock’s video at one hour fifty minutes and fifty five seconds. This is the fate of all third way claims. They are specific details about specific systems. They are approximate mechanisms. But what evolutionary theory is all about are the ultimate mechanisms. What is the source of the origin of these systems and what allowed them to spread and be manifest in a population. The answer to these questions lie in the basic modern synthetic paradigm mutation selection and drift. So that was all Hancock. Okay. So if we’re talking about some form of mutation some form of selection and some form of drift is neo Darwinism as far as he’s concerned and we don’t need Lamarck ism. We don’t need anything else. This is all just part of the theory. Okay. So in essence then you have the post Darwin’s who are saying neo Darwinism is defective and you have the neo Darwin’s who aren’t arguing they’re not arguing they’re arguing that neo Darwinism is more expansive than the post Darwin’s think and that it includes the examples that they’re using. Does that make sense?

[00:16:10]  Blue: It makes perfect sense. Yes.

[00:16:12]  Red: Okay. But I’m not entirely convinced that Zach’s overall view is correct because if it were to be shown that there is a widespread misunderstanding of the term neo Darwinian evolution quote unquote to in most people’s minds means something closer to Richard Dawkins reductive selfish gene approach to evolution then that would seem to indicate that Shapiro and Noble were correct to criticize the current popular understanding of neo Darwinian evolution. So this would be true even if evolutionary biologists like Hancock understood the term in a more reasonable way than most other scientists and this is the thing that I really didn’t see Zach handle and was probably where my strongest criticism of Hancock’s video was. I then proceeded to give several examples of famous quote misunderstandings. So this included David Deutsch outright stating that Dawkins view is the correct modern understanding of Darwinism and going on to wire it deeply into his constructor theory of knowledge in the form of the two sources hypothesis I I the idea that there are only two sources of knowledge genes and means note that another possibility here is that Hancock is incorrect that Dawkins that that Dawkins isn’t the best modern interpretation of Darwinian evolution in which case Hancock’s whole argument against Noble and Shapiro is actually wrong. So and the reason why I try to include David Deutsch into this is because it guaranteed that created a triangle where something something had to give right. So you either have to argue that David Deutsch misunderstands modern evolution. He’s a world famous scientist, right? Or you have to argue that Hancock as an evolutionary biologist

[00:18:05]  Red: misunderstands modern evolutionary theory or you have to argue that Shapiro and Noble are correct that there tend to be people who misunderstand the theory and that it’s come to mean something different than what Hancock is saying. So that was why I liked that example there. I also gave examples of biologists getting angry with Barbara McClintock when she realized that genes can jump because that violated their understanding of how genes were central to evolution or the surgeon general misunderstanding how quickly bacteria can learn to resist antibiotics due to holding to the standard school room understanding of evolution of genes rather than what actually happens in real life. But I still have to wonder how convincing these examples are sure they’re they’re they’re good examples and I think they do show that misunderstanding is a bound right. But it could be for example that Shapiro and me are just cherry picking. The problem is is that Shapiro and Noble have no real alternative theory to offer. What we really need is a totally different paradigm that clearly is so different than the way biologists currently understand evolution that it makes strange and weird unexpected predictions that can then be verified thus establishing that this new theory is not ad hoc. And yes I’m intentionally using the word verified because that matters in this context and crit rats that have a problem with the word verified do not understand this aspect of poppers epistemology. You verify the experiments the predictions. That’s exactly what you verify. It’s not the theory that you verify. This is really what we need here. Okay.

[00:19:51]  Red: So this is where the work of Michael Michael Levin can be very useful and might give us a more definitive resolution to the question of whether or not biologists have been missing important aspects of evolution due to actually holding too strongly to the genocentric understanding of evolution even though that isn’t actually a part of modern neo Darwinian evolutionary theory. So now I’m going to cover a part of Zach Hancock Hancock’s arguments that I left out from the previous episode because I feel like they have direct relevance to Michael Levin’s work. So I saved it for this episode Hancock has a section in his video called agency intentionality and other weasel words. Let me give you a few sample quotes Hancock quoting the Forbes interview with Noble at one hour one minute 56 seconds. He says to noble this routine procedure offers clear evidence that the organism actively particip of the organism actively participating in its own evolution. It’s doing natural selection. This is an alternative theory of evolution where cognition is fundamental to this theory. The smallest unit of life cells have some version of intelligence and intent that allows them to detect and respond to their environments at one hour two minutes 40 seconds. Noble and friends contend that organisms including single celled organisms are purposeful agents capable of directing their own evolution their goal oriented and they have the ability to make conscious or semi conscious decisions about how to deal with challenges that the environment throws at them. These ideas are either remarkably profound or extremely trivial depending on how you define these terms. So let’s take an example. This isn’t the example that Hancock uses but it’s probably a more obvious example than the one he uses.

[00:21:42]  Red: So let’s take sexual selection peacocks was the example from the previous episode as our example. Female peacocks prefer male peacocks with a beautiful but not exactly useful tale. In the last episode I asked if this meant feel female peacocks are practicing quote Lamarck ism. Now of course I’m trying to force you to think harder about what Lamarck ism really is when I asked that ask that because most people even though it kind of fits the definition of a Lamarck ism which is a very squishy idea. Nobody would probably seriously consider it to be Lamarck ism. But now let’s ask a similar question. Does this mean peacocks are agents participating in their own evolutionary process. Well sure of course it means that but so what this doesn’t seem like much of a revelation does it Hancock using a similar example then says this is one hour three minutes thirty seven seconds from such a definition we see that organic organismal agency includes everything from foraging to taking a nap at one hour sixteen minutes twenty six seconds noble is an effect is in effect suggesting that the woodpecker creating a cavity in a tree is an act of purpose of purposeful agency and directs the evolution of the net hatch that might nest in it. Therefore neo Darwinism is dead. Now I laugh pretty hard at that comment. In fact Hancock points out that in evolutionary biology they invented a new world new word to deal with this called teleonomy as opposed to teleology. It’s the idea that overall there is no purpose but evolved purposes teleonomy does exist. So teleonomy according to Hancock is gold directness in gold directness in biology should be understood as emergent from underlining genetic mechanisms at

[00:23:38]  Red: one hour five minutes and seventeen seconds Hancock says not that the cells actually have some inherent purpose since purpose implies a mind and cells don’t have minds one hour ten minutes evolutionary biologists are hesitant about using words like agency because they have an anthropomorphic undertone and can be easily misunderstood by the general public but it’s not because we don’t think organisms including ourselves make conscious decisions that last statement needs a little bit of context. It wasn’t Hancock claiming humans don’t make conscious decisions in context he was responding nobles to noble quoting Jerry coin who claimed that there was no free will his actual point was that the question of humans having or not having free will played no bearing in biologists biologists hesitancy to use terms like agency because of problems like this Hancock takes issue with use of certain words that noble and Shapiro use freely but other scientists are not likely to use at one hour seventeen minutes nineteen seconds words like intentionality purpose and agency to me really have no place in evolutionary biology says Hancock especially when evolution is being explained to the general public because they have a tendency to confuse and give false impressions at one hour eighteen minutes three seconds my point is that it simply isn’t necessary to use such loaded words as they indicate completely trivial concepts in the first place and only act to spread confusion about how evolution actually works at one hour fifty five minutes eleven seconds Shapiro thinks terms like agency and purpose are themselves driving forces that are not merely emergent properties of chemicals that again are not merely emergent properties of chemicals but are something special this kind of language walks dangerously close to vitalism spiritualism and frankly creationism

[00:25:40]  Red: Hancock quotes Peter Bowler as arguing that Lamarck ism keeps coming back because it implies things that seemed more hopeful than regular evolution Hancock summarizes the bowler argument for why people like Lamarck ism as at one hour fifty three minutes and thirty six seconds organisms choose their response to each environment challenge and thus direct evolution by their own efforts Hancock goes on to opine with or without any religious implications this is certainly a more hopeful vision than derived from Darwinism says Hancock life becomes an active force in nature not merely responding to a passive in a passive manner to environmental pressures Hancock’s argument is that the real reason that noble and Shapiro keep bringing back Lamarck ism and trying to make a big deal out of agency and cognition is because they perhaps subconsciously have a preference for a more hopeful and appealing version of evolution or put another way Hancock in response to nobles claim that there were ideological reasons biologists struggled to drop false views of evolution points out that noble himself could be easily accused of the same and reversed you know I’m going to go ahead and own that and say that you know I think this this is a post Darwinism neo neo Darwinism might be true factually but you know I’ll also also admit that I hope it is true and it does seem to be a more like optimistic view of reality honestly than just that the genes are just controlling everything I don’t know I can’t even exactly say why but the criticism does resonate I’ll say that

[00:27:25]  Red: okay at one hour 51 minutes 48 seconds Hancock says noble attributes are a legacy of missteps to rigid assumptions put in place over a century ago to stand in for lack of evidence rigid assumptions that’s it evolutionary biology was hindered by quote rigid assumptions this brazen disrespect says Hancock for the history of the field is insulting as I pointed out in the historical section at the beginning of the video evolutionary biologists came to the current paradigm not by rigid assumptions but by evidence and then quoting Joseph Felinstein at one hour 57 minutes 27 seconds we are left at the end still waiting for a post neo Darwinism Darwin Darwinian theory that has not appeared almost 40 years later and after many new iterations on the same old critiques we’re all still waiting for a better theory that has yet to materialize so let’s summarize Hancock’s claims here which I have given to you without comment or criticism he is saying we should avoid terms like agency and purpose in evolution for they will be misunderstood by the public

[00:28:39]  Red: but that evolutionary biologists are well aware of the fact that animals make choices as part of the evolutionary part of evolutionary theory though this should be understood in terms of part of their generic genetic inheritance this has come to be called teleonomy not to be confused with teleology to avoid confusing the public but there is simply nothing new here claims Hancock Shapiro and noble are raising issues that already fit into the theory and don’t shed any new light on evolutionary theory so at one hour 56 minutes 38 seconds he says noble is feeding the social media algorithm what the algorithm likes is controversy no one likes to hear it’s actually all good here now this is all a good setup for what is so remarkable about Michael Levin’s research listeners may recall that I used to be a creationist this is when I was a kid

[00:29:38]  Red: I’d ask evolutionist to explain via evolutionary theory how life even got started in the first place the point I was making was that the theory had a large hole in fact this is correct the theory does in fact have a large hole but evolutionists arguing with me would never admit this they would without fail refer me to the Miller your a experiment and act wrongly like that somehow solved the whole problem they simply didn’t want to admit to the existence of an unsolved problem and evolution less quote the general public misunderstood and thought that quote this refuted evolutionary theory I’m now a hundred percent in the evolutionist camp I’m zero percent creationist 100 % evolutionist but I still find that entire tactic abhorrent if evolutionary theory has a hole about how life got started that should have been admitted to and the Miller array experiment tells us basically nothing about that and this should have been admitted to so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m not going to be the most sympathetic person to arguments that we might quote mislead the general public having said that I’m going to now walk that back a little bit if saying cell cognition causes the public to think cells are conscious and if that’s actually happening then it seems to me that he’s making a fair point because obviously cells aren’t actually conscious or I guess we don’t know that for sure I’m assuming that they’re not conscious that would be the general assumption since we don’t have a theory of conscious like who would know for sure right but generally speaking there’s an assumption that a cell is not conscious and if selling saying cell cognition makes people think that they are then yeah I can see why Hancox got a concern there now I became interested in Levin’s work back in episode 21 evolution outside the genome a little history here is needed I started really thinking about artificial general intelligence after reading David Deutch’s books and his Aeon article on artificial intelligence see episode 58 Deutch’s creative blocks a decade later so not surprisingly I initially held the two sources hypothesis that the that the only two forms of knowledge creation were memes and genes see episodes 75 Deutch’s theory of knowledge the walking robot and the episodes that follow 76 to 80 for my extended look at the end criticisms of the two sources hypothesis however as I started to get interested in artificial intelligence going back to work on a master’s degree at one point to dig into it further I found that most of the algorithms met all of Deutch’s criteria for being considered knowledge creating including his own example of the robot that learns to walk using a genetic algorithm this is what episode 75 was about in a panel discussion this would be episodes 12 to 14 of this show on AGI I made a comment about how I suspected machine learning was a form of paparian epistemology Ella Hopner who was part of the panel told me to check out Donald Campbell’s theory of evolutionary epistemology so I read Campbell’s paper more than one paper actually but one in particular is the famous one and I found it somewhat wanting and I’ve actually been very fairly critical of it

[00:32:58]  Red: I talked about some of my concerns with it in episode 25 universal Darwinism does artificial intelligence create knowledge and particularly episode 26 is universal Darwinism the sole source of knowledge creation note that I use the term universal Darwinism which actually is a correct term for Campbell’s theory but it’s actually the less common of the two terms the other one the correct term for his theory the one that he coined for it was evolutionary epistemology now I really thought that was a term that pre -existed Campbell he coined the term in this paper and I did not realize that at the time that I made these episodes so I called them universal Darwinism even though it’s a worse term because I was somehow trying to have a term for Campbell’s theory okay I don’t wouldn’t make that mistake today I am going to refer to his theory as evolutionary epistemology since I at the time hadn’t realized that Campbell himself and coined the term to refer to his theory however there was simply no denying that Campbell’s theory even though I have concerns with it was strongly and unavoidably at odds with Dwight’s two sources hypothesis so whereas Dwight thinks that there are currently only two implementations of poppers theory of knowledge in all of reality genes and memes Campbell thought poppers theory of knowledge was ubiquitous and that all quote inductive achievement or knowledge creation Campbell uses both those terms it’s a little unclear if he means them as synonyms or not I think he did but I’ll have to make an argument to that effect later but he uses both terms he refers to both that they are common in nature but that what’s really going on when you have a inductive achievement of any kind so claims Campbell is that really really blind variation and selective retention is happening behind the scenes which is of course a form of poppers epistemology but a generalized form so worse yet Popper absolutely loved Campbell’s theory Popper had a few minor disagreements he actually lists exactly what his disagreements are so we know what his disagreements were and that I

[00:35:14]  Blue: was just going to ask you about that and which which book is this that Popper talks about this I’m curious

[00:35:19]  Red: well you know the only book I found it in is called Evolution epistemology rationality and the sociology of knowledge with contributions by Sir Carl Popper Donald T. Campbell W. W. Bartley the third and a whole bunch of other names

[00:35:33]  Blue: oh so this is kind of obscure so he had just like a chapter in there or something yes

[00:35:38]  Red: so you have one chapter by by a Campbell you have another one with a follow -on paper he did and then you have Popper’s response to his original paper so Popper in his response it was glowing like it like it was the most glowing I’ve ever seen Popper be towards another theory he did have a few minor disagreements but his enthusiastic endorsement which I cover in episode 26 by the way was so overwhelmingly positive that I started to realize that both Campbell and Popper would never endorse the two sources hypothesis moreover despite some problems with Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology Popper and Campbell had some overwhelmingly good explanations for why they were at least in general right and do it was in general wrong since Deutsch didn’t write until after Popper and Campbell were dead of course what I mean is they anticipate his objections and they do and had already responded to his arguments in full it was not long after this that I happened to see Michael Levin in a YouTube video presenting his research here was this overt example of exactly what Popper and Campbell were claiming a miniature version of evolution that wasn’t part of the genome it was an outright falsification of Deutsche’s two sources hypothesis this led me to trying to talk to other members of the Crittback community about some of the problems in Deutsche’s two sources hypothesis now recall also that my concern was strictly with the two sources hypothesis not with Deutsche’s constructive theory of knowledge in general which I think is quite compatible with Campbell’s and Popper’s views

[00:37:16]  Red: the rest of the story you probably already know because I mentioned it several times in this podcast I started asking questions in raising issues within the Crittback community mostly around Donald Campbell’s theories originally but also with Levin’s work I found that many though not all Crittrats would respond to potential falsifiers by ad hoc saving their theories this surprised me because Popper is quite specific on what objectively counts as an ad hoc save and made it part of his critical methodology that you do not say ad hoc save your theories when I pointed that out to the Crittrats I’d get something like a blank stare this is online so it’s not a literal blank stare they’d have no idea what I was talking about or they’d even insist that Popper had no critical methodology or occasionally they would explain to me that Deutsche showed that this part of Popper was incorrect and that there was no need for ad hocness anymore because now we have easy to variness the easy to very criteria and it’s replaced it now I had been aware that it was common for people to misunderstand Popper but I suddenly realized that even people that had read Popper in detail often misunderstood even basic aspects of his theory this led me to wonder if it wasn’t quote Popper’s fault something you’ve probably heard me bring up a few times that his methodology hasn’t caught on was he saying things that were causing confusion or misunderstanding this was why this is why much of this podcast is me exploring that idea in detail and working out new ways to explain Popper’s epistemology that avoid the misunderstandings culminating in episodes like episode 82 Popper’s ratchet or episode 93 philosophical theories versus bad explanations which was my attempt to generalize Popper’s theory to include what today we would call metaphysical theories

[00:39:05]  Red: now if I’m being honest Levin’s work was somewhat ancillary to all this it was it wasn’t even really Campbell’s work that was the stone that started the avalanche for me because honestly I didn’t like Campbell’s paper that much it was really Popper’s strongly worded endorsement of Campbell’s theory that forced me to start thinking much much harder about Popper’s epistemology but Levin’s theories did play a role in this even if it was an important ancillary role so I have a special warm place in my heart for his theories so okay so now you have my history of Levin’s work and how it was a factor in adjusting my thinking about Popper’s epistemology and you have some strongly worded criticisms from Zach Hancock aimed at noble but as we’ll see the criticisms particularly the ones I did at the beginning of this episode apply to Michael Levin and in this context I want to go over Michael Levin’s research keeping Zach Hancock’s criticisms of self cognition in mind it can serve as a way to tease out the truth from the noble versus Hancock and everyone else argument it is also a startling but real life corroboration of Campbell Campbell’s and Popper’s evolutionary epistemology it is also a refutation of Deutch’s two sources hypothesis and it’s even possibly a way forward in solving Ken Stanley’s the problem of open -endedness and how life came out of non -life although Stanley doubted that when I asked him that question

[00:40:41]  Red: it is therefore possibly related to the problem of AGI since AGI is related to the problem of open -endedness for all these reasons I feel Michael Levin’s theories really demand more study and I feel they fit perfectly into a four strands worldview and corrects it also corrects one of the key errors in Deutch’s theories moreover no one seems to actually disagree with Michael Levin go search for Dennis Noble is wrong on YouTube or Google you will get a lot of hits now go search for Michael Levin is wrong you will get zippo at least at the time that I wrote this the slides pack that I made for this podcast I think there are two reasons for this the first is that Michael Levin simply hasn’t made wild triggering claims like Lamarckism is back or neo -Darwinian evolution is dead like that as Noble loves to make even though as we’ll see Levin’s research program is everything Noble and Shapiro could have hoped for the second is more important second reason for why nobody is arguing with Levin is important

[00:41:52]  Red: trying to fight Michael Levin is a little bit like picking a fight with Superman you’re going to lose Michael Levin unlike Noble and Shapiro has developed testable theories and produced startling empirical evidence that makes his point for him so he doesn’t have to rely on armchair philosophizing like Noble and Shapiro often rely on or specific counter examples that as we can always find a way to tuck back into the price equations okay so let me just say also there’s quite a bit of speculation that Levin’s work is going to win him the Nobel Prize fact at the time I wrote the this the notes for this episode I checked the odds of the betting odds for him winning the Nobel Prize 44 % so his works have kind of a big deal and it’s just groundbreaking what is the relationship then if any between Levin and Noble Levin has made it clear he is a big fan of Noble and often quotes him approvingly consider this quote from YouTube video on Mendel’s pod called fourth season opener Michael Levin on the new biology yes that’s actually the title at about 43 minutes and 56 seconds Dennis Noble is one of the best people that’s been talking about this for decades about no privileged level of biological causation that was Levin talking about Noble Noble moreover Levin actually interviewed Noble on a podcast that he is co -host host on saying many supportive things the video is on a channel called Michael Levin’s academic content and it’s called

[00:43:31]  Blue: Ashta Ashta Jane Sims and I interview Dennis Noble I’m probably butchering her name sorry

[00:43:39]  Red: I’ve never seen anyone claim that Levin is a third -weir but this seems to have more to do with Levin just being disinterested in positioning himself as a radical heretic and less to do with him actually having any strong disagreements with Noble consider these statements from Levin to Noble in Levin’s interview of Dennis Noble same podcast I just mentioned 4135 in your Noble’s work and in your writing you’ve emphasized a couple of really fundamental changes of perspective that have so many trickle -down effects if they were more widely recognized the incredibly important role of goal -directed activity in biology the top -down causation the work on no privileged level of causation I mean I think these are incredibly fundamental ideas that once people take them on board they make you see biology in a new way and they then informs and that then informs all the specific things you may do later there’s just no denying from this quote that Levin is fully on board with basically everything Noble’s claiming at least in terms of the high -level principles if not the specifics you’ll never see Levin maybe you will but I never found Levin claiming Lamarckism was back right but in terms of the basic ideas and principles he seems to be just completely in agreement with Dennis Noble

[00:45:07]  Blue: but can I interject one thing yes but my to be fair I mean Michael Levin is a pretty out there guy right I mean he’s not like he I know he he does a lot of talks and things with Bernardo Castro you know who that is

[00:45:26]  Red: I’ve kind of heard the name but

[00:45:28]  Blue: yeah okay well he’s kind of one of these guys who’s he’s a he’s a critic of I mean I I’m out of my depth here I can’t really fully explain what he what he does but he’s he’s a critic of materialism and believes like in a universal consciousness kind of a thing I don’t want to I don’t want to say you have an

[00:45:47]  Red: actual quote from from Levin actually saying he believes in those things by the way I think no

[00:45:54]  Blue: no I don’t I don’t I’m just I’m just talking I’m just

[00:45:57]  Red: yeah but

[00:45:58]  Blue: but I do I do know if you search for Michael Levin and Bernardo Castro they they do talks together so I mean I I I assume there’s in somewhat alignment on some of these things we’re not I’m not even saying it’s bad but I he you know Bernardo Castro would probably be dismissed as a almost like a deep pack Chopra kind of character by most mainstream scientists I’m not rightly or wrongly but so

[00:46:30]  Red: here’s the thing just like Noble is willing to appear on shows with creationists right paranoid one of the things that Hancock brought up even though he never actually is a creationist on these shows Levin does much the same thing Levin is very guarded in what he says and so that’s why I I felt like I could even though I’ve never seen these videos I could with confidence say he’s never actually said it has he because he just doesn’t right

[00:46:57]  Blue: okay

[00:46:57]  Red: now he admits he has some beliefs that are a bit out there but he won’t say what they are and he’ll say about 70 % of my beliefs are entirely public this is what you’re going to find on my videos I’ve got a 30 % that informs it there’s no scientific basis for it it’s just part of my beliefs I don’t even bring it up I don’t even fill the need to to raise it so I think what you’re going to find is that Levin at some level does have some Wu Wu beliefs that he just never raises and you will never find him actually the first case you will find is that he mentions he believes in a platonic realm unfortunately the term platonic realm means so many different it’s a suitcase term that means so many different things and so many different circumstances there may even be a reasonable way to understand that term the way he’s using it okay so I think you’re going to find that he really does a pretty good job of just not going there like he’s got he’s got beliefs that do inform his research program but ultimately it all and I’ll give you the quotes later but ultimately it comes down to can you actually do experiments and if you can’t then he’s just not going to even bring it up

[00:48:13]  Blue: okay

[00:48:14]  Red: and to him that’s just a non scientific belief and so it doesn’t doesn’t even need to be raised um I mean you know I’m definitely

[00:48:22]  Blue: in favor of talking to all kinds of people I’m not like trying to make a guilt by Association kind of an argument but I’m just putting that out there

[00:48:31]  Red: okay um so Levin is it outright agreeing with noble that people have missed massively important aspects of Darwinian evolution and biology due to following failing to understand that there is no privilege level of causation ie due to always insisting on the genes I view that the genes create chemicals and that’s what drives everything so let’s actually talk about Levin’s actual experiments because I think this is where the rubber meets the road okay so let’s this is one of my favorites Levin put a flatworm a planaria into a solution of barium now the barium blocks the ability of the cells to exchange potassium with the outside world so the head of the planaria is full of neurons that exchange potassium so being in this solution causes the head to explode

[00:49:24]  Red: now recall that planaria can regenerate if you cut them in half so the planaria will grow back a new head in a couple of weeks now here’s the stunner the new head that grows back is now barium adapted and no longer has problems with barium now Levin wanted to know how that could be so he looked at the genes of the barium adapted head and found that a small number of the gene of the genes were turned off and on to adapt to this novel stressor now here’s the amazing part planaria never see barium in the wild there is no evolutionary history of knowing what to do when you’re hit with barium so at seven minutes in the podcast called can cells think Michael Levin on the well he says so just imagine you’re a bunch of cells and you’re hit with this incredible field feels physiological stressor you’ve never seen before you’ve got tens of thousands of genes what what do you do how do you know which gene to turn off and on you don’t have time to try combinations you don’t have time for exhaustive search you don’t have time for hill climbing you don’t have time for to try random things because you’ll probably kill the cell long before you solve the problem and yet you are able to navigate from where you are to where you need to be to escape this physiological stressor and so what I think evolution has done is pivoted some of the same tricks from very simple systems that only solve metabolic metabolic problems eventually to

[00:51:01]  Red: and when multicellularity comes on the scene large -scale anatomical problems and so it’s never a question of is something physics and chemistry or is it cognitive the question is what kind of cognition and how much that was all from a quote from Levin you probably just notice that Michael Levin appears to be quite comfortable with the very kind of language that Zach Hancock and most biologists try to avoid speaking of cell cognition and agency in particular with particular ease consider this quote 45 minutes 45 seconds from the same podcast and I think that kind of embodiment is critical but it’s not the physical space or the physical body that’s critical it’s the loop it’s this having to be an agent to say what to what do I do next and having a set of options and a set of pressures and constraints and enough of a cognitive system which can be very minimal that lets you do things where the future is going to be different from the past that’s what I mean by embodiment note how these are exactly the weasel words Hancock objected to and Shapiro and Noble but this time we’ve got hard empirical experiments that demonstrate the previously unknown problem -solving ability of embodied cells now of course this idea that cells can solve novel problems isn’t really in any way at odds with quote neo Darwinian evolution if by that term you mean Zach Hancock’s version of it that’s centered around the general the gene neutral price equations it is really is it really that surprising that Darwinian evolution gave this Plenaria a learning algorithm to solve that it can solve a problem with a novel environmental stressor I mean isn’t that like exactly what our own immune system does right so this is a admit this is a bit more interesting because Plenaria can reproduce both sexually and asexually so this barium adapted head will get passed to a new Plenaria as part of its inheritance even though the genes have technically not changed so if you can wrap your mind around the gene neutral price equations version of neo Darwinism this is still quote handled by the theory

[00:53:15]  Red: but it’s interesting how people have responded to this video when I sent it to them and I feel like this really is important even though we’re talking about you know layman one person a non -crit rat I said it to immediately wanted to declare they’re at a development artifact of how heads form in response to an environment but then he acknowledged that he wasn’t sure why the Plenaria had to turn off and on various genes a crit rat I sent it to declared that there was probably a quote more robust head stored in the genes that it only deploys when it’s needed and by chance it was barium resistant and then he said well or maybe it really did encounter barium or our barium like substance in the past and he said he would be impossible for you to ever prove otherwise so this theory doesn’t have any way that you can falsify what she saw as a a positive so he argued that there was probably no actual learning or problem solving except by regular genetic evolution now this answer is interesting because he’s a crit rat and this is clearly an ad hoc save he’s also leaving an explanation gap as to why the genes had to activate and deactivate to be able to create this barium resistant head now when I pointed out to him that he was ad hoc saving

[00:54:27]  Red: of evolution and that such say saves were always possible he didn’t understand why was making this point as a fellow critical rationalist and so naturally he was unimpressed by argument the argument didn’t even seem slightly impressive to him he was convinced that probably there was barium somewhere in the history and and you couldn’t prove otherwise so there was really no reason here to see this as a learning algorithm now in both cases there was this knee jerk reaction experiment wholly from kind of the standard view of evolution that we all get taught in school rather than acknowledge actual agentic learning and creation of new knowledge within the the life of a single organism know why

[00:55:10]  Red: I’d suggest it’s because Shapiro and Noble are correct that neo Darwinism is understood almost entirely as equivalent to a single level of emergent the genes I view and that none of the others are generally understood no other level of emergence is understood to be valid now Levin’s team has another experiment they created Picasso tadpoles with scrambled facial features like eyes on top of the head but disrupting normal by disrupting normal development processes now normally tadpoles develop into frogs with specific facial features in specific places and it was thought to be hardwired I mean course because we often think of genes as being blueprints the Picasso tadpoles despite their scrambled starting points developed into normal frogs showing that development isn’t hardwired instead the system is homeostatic error correction meaning it corrects errors to reach its goal the cells actions are goal directed with the goal of making a correct frog face the system remembers what a correct frog face should look like cells are pursuing goals in an an anatomical space or the space of all possible configurations of the body the tadpole face

[00:56:26]  Red: of individual cells the collective cells act with collective intelligence rather than individual instructions and he found that bioelectricity is the key cells communicate and integrate their intelligence using ion channels and electrical connections this creates a network that stores a pattern of what a correct frog face should be the idea of a collective intelligence communicated via bioelectricity just like the brain uses but now mind you is going to be a big factor in most of Levin’s experiments so this is kind of a big deal for understanding his point of view and what his theories are in short the Picasso tadpole experiment shows that development uses a flexible error correcting system not a hard wired blueprint cells work together to achieve a goal using bioelectric patterns as a reference showing a form of tissue level intelligence notice that we’re not even talking about cell intelligence anymore we’re talking about something even more basic than that tissue even smaller than cells now at 14 season season opener Michael Levin on the new biology at 13 58 he says keep in mind this already is a very much a taboo topic because in biology we’re not supposed to think about goals we’re supposed to think about emergence from chemical signals you’re not supposed to think that these things are in some way moving towards a goal now

[00:57:56]  Red: definition of goal which is a conscious I know what my goal is I know I can change my goal you know this is not what I’m claiming at all I’m using a very cybernetic kind of definition I’m lower down on that spectrum I’m not saying anything about the conscious experience of this notice how that he’s not a pan psychist here all I’m saying is the system has there’s a set point it tries very hard by expenditure to get to that set point and it will do so even when you try to prevent it with some degree of intelligence that’s what I mean by goals it’s a cybernetic it’s a non magical definition now another experiment he did was the limb regeneration so adult frogs don’t naturally regenerate limbs but Levin’s team can induce

[00:58:47]  Red: regeneration of the limbs they do this by manipulating the bi -electric signals in the first 24 hours after amputation cells use electrical networks to communicate which Levin calls a language Levin does not micromanage individual cells control genetic gene expression or use 3D printing instead he communicates with the cells at the level of the bi -electric bi -electric network and he sets a high -level goal the treatment involves telling cells to follow a limb growth path not a scarring path the cells are influenced by the bi -electric pattern or set point that is established Levin’s tools read and write the memories of the collective by observing and manipulating the electrical network states he’s working to crack the bi -electric code to induce specific outcomes genes are concerned only with building the hardware but the bi -electric software direct cells Levin can make cells do things outside the genetic code Levin provided a communication interface to set a goal the cells already know what a leg looks like and they build it cells follow a bi -electric pattern or set point that represents the goal changing this set point directs the cells this shows the bi -electric language can be used to override genetic limitations and trigger complex regeneration processes so in essence you cut the the frog’s leg off and then you send a signal that through experiment you’ve come up with you know means regrow this leg and even though genetic frogs don’t normally regrow legs

[01:00:25]  Red: because that’s knowledge that is contained within the bi -electric signals and it just simply is a different goal that’s been given and that way you don’t have to like try to figure out what genes to adjust and what chemicals to adjust you basically just tell the body regrow that limb new goal boom it doesn’t at in the podcast from bi -electric fields a paradigm shift in biology at 3741 he says my claim about goal directedness and the key point is that by targeting these patterns through interventions using techniques that modify memories you can produce complex outcomes that were previously impossible the micro management required would simply be too difficult now he gives a really interesting example of this so from bi -electric fields a paradigm shift in biology 3741 he says a simple neuroscience neuroscience example of this is you have a rat and you want the rat to do a circus trick sit on a little bicycle or something and somebody says okay I can see this thing is a deterministic molecular system so here’s what you what we’re going to do we’re going to find all the different muscle motions that need to happen to make the body do it then we’re going to track back to all the nerves that need to be activated then we’re going to track back all the way into the brain

[01:01:43]  Red: and then we’re going to go through and I’m going to tell you exactly which pixels on the retina you need to activate to stimulate it to make to make it do the thing now in theory this is possible says Levin in reality the sun will burn out before you figure out any of that but someone who understands that the rat really is can say no, no, no you don’t need to do any of that you can train the rat

[01:02:07]  Blue: what do you mean you can train the rat top -down control you collaborate with the rat you incentivize the rat what’s magic about this is that the top -down control pushes all the complexity onto the system itself you don’t need to figure out which neurons need to fire the rats already very good at knowing what needs to be done given certain top -down controls it’s a communication problem not a micromanagement problem the same thing is going on here we know this is a goal -directed phenomenon because we change the goals we don’t touch the hardware we don’t change the DNA we don’t tell any of the stem cells what to do all of that is taken care of by the system all we do is reset the goals that’s the beauty of goal -directed systems you can communicate with them you can reset the goals maybe they learn some cells and tissues learn

[01:03:01]  Red: okay but re -growing a limb is setting a goal that the genes already knew how to do

[01:03:08]  Blue: can you actually set a goal that the genes didn’t intend something entirely new not part of the genome so there is an experiment that Levin did to test that it’s the two -headed planaria experiment so Levin’s lab induced two -headed planaria flatworms by alter altering their bioelectric patterns without modifying the worm’s DNA so the standard standard biology suggests morphology is determined by genes but these worms when you cut them in two continue to reproduce two -headed offspring even without further bioelectric manipulations this suggests this indicates a heritable change in phenotype independent of genetics so you have this two -headed planaria you cut it that’s how it does asexual reproduction and the new planaria that grows will also be two -headed even though the genes haven’t changed okay

[01:04:04]  Red: the bioelectric circuit stores the information for the number of heads effectively acting as a set point for the worms morphology which can be reprogrammed the cells use this bioelectric pattern not the DNA to determine the number of heads to grow the genome itself was not changed showing that morphological information is not solely encoded in DNA so now why was this overlooked? so let’s actually talk about this so in

[01:04:34]  Red: I think it’s the same podcast episode but now at 949 maybe I didn’t write this one down right he says there are you know looking back you can always tell a conventional story and sometimes especially with the outcomes of our work you would have to put in some epicycle so to speak you would have to put in some extra bells and whistles to make it fit the conventional paradigm but you always can this is all Mike 11 so when somebody says look you know this is what you’ve shown and somebody else says oh I’m sure there’s a molecular explanation for it of course there’s a molecular explanation for it there’s always a reductive explanation for it afterwards the real question is what was the paradigm that got you to do the experiment in the first place and why wasn’t it done before the first two -headed worms I mean there are many ways to make two -headed worms the first two -headed worms were seen at the turn of the century around 1903 and so the question though is since between then and 2009 when we did did our experiment why did nobody we cut them and then find out that they inherited the two heads to my knowledge nobody ever recut them the reason you wouldn’t recut them is because if you have a standard belief that your genome is what determines your morphology and the genome hasn’t been touched well then why would you do it of course you had an expectation of course they will go back to being one head once you cut off the

[01:06:06]  Red: ectopic head our paradigm predicts the opposite because we were thinking that the bioelectric circuits that store this information as a kind of memory the most obvious thing about memory is that it keeps state either temporarily or permanently but it keeps state so I think that’s important right it’s not just the phenotype I mean anybody can get a double head there are many ways to get a double head so just to answer your specific question I think what we have here is a new paradigm the new paradigm is this idea that everything exists on a spectrum of cognition and that you cannot say whether something is on that spectrum from previously held philosophical commitments you have to do experiments now think about this for a moment there had had been experiments to recreate two -headed plan to create two -headed plan area but it took over a century to realize that a two -headed plan area will reproduce and form new plan area with two heads why did it take a century because it just seemed obvious to biologists that since genes produced phenotypes that if you did cut one they’d go back to being one -headed this was just so strongly built into the understanding of the theory that it didn’t occur to them to try or to put another way neo -darwin Darwinists couldn’t think to do such an experiment due to rigid thinking rooted inner reductionist genes I view of neo -darwinism now that’s not an offensive opinion from noble that’s a factual statement about what actually happened in this case okay

[01:07:46]  Red: notice also that lemon is pointing out that the problem isn’t the genes I view itself and I think this is really important reductive theories like that can be entirely correct the problem is reduction ism or a belief perhaps held subconsciously that you have to explain neo -darwinism and biology in terms of genes controlling chemicals and making taboos around emergent explanations that do a better job of explaining the same phenomenon the genes I view isn’t going away ever no one nor does this reduce its importance if anything emergent explanations like this agentic view that we’re talking about this cell cognition view enhance the reductive explanation of the same phenomenon the real issue is the taboo on the emergent explanation that explains it from a different level levin points out that if reductive explanations were really superior then why not try to explain biology in terms of quantum foam you pick the level of emergence that makes sense for the problem you’re trying to solve and for levin he decided to view cells and even tissue inside of cells as having a minimal form of intelligence or put another way that they contain knowledge creating learning algorithms and this turned out to be just the right paradigm to open up whole new ways of research to research theory to research evolutionary theory that everyone else had missed due to not wanting to quote miss leave the public another one that honestly this is very personal one cancer is caused by cells disconnecting from according to levin and according to his experiments disconnecting electrically from their neighbors this may not even be caused by genetic damage so levin’s approach in experiment was to reconnect cells electrically restoring their

[01:09:36]  Red: of the tissue this mind -meld is a state of collective intelligence where cells adhere to the tissue’s goals preventing uncontrolled growth bioelectricity is the cognitive glue according to levin that’s his term that bind cells together enables them to act as a collective restoring electrical conditions redirect cell cancer cells to the goal of making normal tissue

[01:09:57]  Blue: so I just kind of always thought that the cell went crazy right and just starts re reproducing itself in some abhorrent way but it sounds like what he’s saying is that the cells just in cancer cells just aren’t connected to the other cells biochemically let me finish the experiment and then okay sorry sorry

[01:10:17]  Red: this method tried frogs prevents or removes tumors even with strong on oncogene expression that is to say abnormal cancer DNA addressing the software without needing to fix the hardware this is a top -down approach using communication rather than micro management of cells Levin views cancer as a disorder of morphogenic intelligence where the boundary between cell and environment is disrupted so this is actually the answer to the first private question which is the cancer cell is a cell that stops thinking of itself as part of a collective

[01:10:52]  Blue: and

[01:10:52]  Red: tries to become a single celled animal that’s trying to reproduce itself

[01:10:55]  Blue: according to him that’s it’s controversial isn’t it or not

[01:11:00]  Red: well let’s keep going okay so yes according to him this approach uses insights from cognitive science not just chemistry to understand and influence cell behavior software signals alone can trigger cancer suggesting that it is a problem of goals and not necessarily a genetic dip to genetic damage so you can’t fix the problem without fixing the genetic um you can fix the problem without fixing the genetic damage you just have to communicate a different goal now this is the experiment that he did so let me actually quote him now 14 season opener Michael Levin on the new biology 3152 software is enough to trigger it and the best part of it is that you can prevent and normalize tumors made from human enogen by forcibly reconnecting cells to their neighbors the oncogene mutated DNA causing cancer is still there we’re not fixing it there’s no gene therapy the oncoprotein is blazing because we can label it you see programming it doesn’t matter because it’s the software that drives it not the hardware that drives it in the end in other words you were saying according to Levin he did this as an experiment right he actually took cancer cell in frogs and he he sent a signal saying actually you’re now have a new goal as to be part of the collective these cancer cells had the mutated cancer genes still they had all the proteins that suggested they were still cancerous and the tumor went away even though all the bad DNA from cancer was still there because you don’t have to fix the genes to bake the cancer go away you simply have to to communicate to the cells that they’re actually part of the overall collective then the cancer goes away

[01:12:53]  Red: now does that answer your question

[01:12:56]  Blue: yeah I mean I I just would be curious if there are other perspectives on this this research I guess part of it is that there’s just so much like weird ideas and pseudo science out there about cancer that I just kind of like makes my makes me a little bit the B.S. detector starts to get a little bit activated even though for all I know his research is great and it’s all right but

[01:13:27]  Red: so I don’t think anybody doubts that he did make cancer go away in a frog there that was a giant discovery

[01:13:36]  Blue: okay

[01:13:36]  Red: now we could ask questions like with this work in humans well we don’t know we have to actually experiment to figure that out he is starting a company to try to cure cancer using by electric signals

[01:13:47]  Blue: okay

[01:13:48]  Red: so he’s putting his money where his mouth is right

[01:13:50]  Blue: yeah

[01:13:50]  Red: and we’re making this very personal now think about all the cancer research that’s been done utilizing the genes I Neo Darwinian view that we’re all steeped did and how unsuccessful to tell the cells via by electric signals and that they used to communicate to just stop being a cancer cell give a new new objective it is so much easier to solve cancer at this level of emergence at least in frogs of course the reason no one thought to do this was because no one knew about by electric fields between cells because they were blind to it because the entire field literally everyone had imbibed Neo Darwinism as requiring explanations about using chemicals to create proteins and that’s it that just was what Neo Darwinism had come to mean no one even conceived the possibility the tissue itself might be an intelligent learning algorithm that can you can simply retrain I suppose the proof’s going to be into putting on this one if we have cures for cancer in you know 50 years thanks to Levin’s research then it really will be academic at that point right

[01:14:58]  Blue: uh huh

[01:14:59]  Red: it may be that this is easier in frogs then it is in humans so that often happens of course so but this is kind of a big breakthrough in cancer research that just nobody’s even attempted this approach nobody even thought to even attempt this sort of approach because just didn’t fit the paradigm as the way we normally think of evolution so the next experiment are Xenobots this is probably the one he’s most famous for so Xenobots are novel living machines Xenobots are tiny living robots made from frog cells they are biological constructs with that exhibit novel behaviors so they’re constructed from repurposed cells they’re created by taking living cells from frog embryos and reassembling them in new forms the cells are not genetically modified so exploring latent biological potential the Xenobots are used to explore the range of what biological hard work can do investigating forms and functions not normally seen in nature so Xenobots exhibit a range of surprising behavior such as self -propulsion collective behavior self -healing they can make copies of themselves by gathering and assembling cells that they find in their environment the cells are not genetically altered their behavior is guided by their original biological programming and their their new configuration Xenobots show that cells are capable of more than their usual behaviors revealing possibilities for how biological materials can be organized Xenobots represent a new kind of bioengineering that is based on understanding and manipulating the collective behavior of cells not just micromanaging genes or proteins

[01:16:37]  Red: the Xenobot experiment challenges traditional notions of what life is and how it behaves moving beyond a focus solely on genetics to a focus on bioelectric networks collective intelligence and the problem solving capabilities of biological materials Xenobot research represents a shift in focus for managing the hardware of cells genes and molecules to the software bioelectric fields and the cell to cell communication so this is now from Michael Evan why intelligence isn’t limited to brains at 1957 what’s happening is that biology unlike our computer technology biology is dealing with a very unreliable medium so we work very hard so that every layer is isolated from the layer above and when you’re writing in high -level computer code you’re not worried that the metal is going to act weird and that suddenly your registers the numbers are going to float off and be something else you can trust that you have full trust in the layer underneath this is regular computers of course biology has the exact opposite approach because everything is unreliable you have no idea exactly how many copies of anything you’re going to have the molecules come and go everything degrades and things misfold and you know

[01:17:50]  Red: on an evolutionary timescale things are going to change guaranteed not only is the environment going to change but your own parts are going to change because you’re going to mutate everything is different each time and for this reason I think that evolution does not over train on the past and this is why we we could talk about it but I have in my papers many many examples of this biology is incredibly good at solving novel problems and making some kind of coherent being in all kinds of crazy configurations that either nature has done or that we do in the lab and the reason is and even the normal embryo was not a mechanical construction to begin with it is solving that problem every single time I like this idea of beginner’s mind it’s like you’re given some tools or you’re given some hardware that’s encoded by the genetics you have no idea what what it used to mean you have no idea what kind of environment and how it was meant to be interpreted and you have no allegiance to that and you have no ability to know exactly what that is all you know is you’re going to use that information as best you can you can right now do whatever the next thing is and that creativity that the requirement to confabulate really to tell a new story without any allegiance to the story used to be is the intelligence ratchet that starts off the physiological and metabolical space and proceeds through anatomical morph space and eventually behavioral space and linguistic space and so on

[01:19:33]  Red: so from 14 see the opener Michael 11 on the new biology 13 14 did the genetics did not give you a hardwired machine that does the same thing every single time what it gave you is hardware that can actually adapt in a context sensitive nature so hopefully with these experiments I’ve at least convinced you that it’s pretty common to have a strong reductionist bias when it comes to neodarwinian evolution and that it’s it is kind of a blinding thing it has caused us to not understand certain aspects of how evolution actually work because we were so afraid of things like cell cognition and things like that didn’t want to mislead the public but instead we ended up misleading the entire field note that none of this changes or violates the price equations the reproduction of a two -headed planaria without a change in the genes fits the gene -neutral price equations just fine and so while Hancock is technically correct that none of these new discoveries is truly quote devastating to neodarwinism per se if you understand them as the gene -neutral price price equations there’s just no getting around the fact that Hancock is still ultimately pretty much entirely wrong we all have been taught to have a rigid reductionist thinking when it comes to neodarwinian evolution and even if the price equations did not include that fact it was still part of how nearly all of us were taught evolution to drive this point home here is Michael Levin account of what evolution actually is this is from biometric fields a paradigm shift in biology professor Michael Levin from Ascension Foundation

[01:21:16]  Red: 2305 what I think evolution is actually doing is developing problem -solving agents and I don’t just mean clever animals that do things in conventional space I mean molecular networks that can learn cells and tissues that solve problems in physiological space and anatomical space and so on and so if you have this idea that what comes out of evolution are these problem solving agents with competencies with certain degrees of intelligence that is up to us to discover that opens up a whole new frontier of research programs around how do we detect unconventional intelligence operating in different problem spaces? Do we communicate with it in ways that are effective to change their behavior? Or put another way what evolution really evolves is learning algorithms or in other words evolutionary algorithms now if if you have listened to this podcast since the beginning you will be one of the very few people not surprised by this we actually did a full podcast about this back on episode 38 animal learning and poppers epistemology and at that point in time I had never heard Levin say any of this but it isn’t like I’m so smart that I made it up myself I was quoting Carl Popper and Levin is more or less a version of Donald Campbell’s theory of evolutionary epistemology in other words Carl Popper and Donald Campbell but in particular this quote I’m about to give you from Carl Popper wholly anticipated Michael Levin and Popper did so back in an era 1961 where words like software weren’t even around

[01:22:53]  Red: so he didn’t know what words to use to refer to what today we would just call software so he tried to use the analogy of a plane’s autopilot because that was the best analogy he could come up with to try to explain what he was referring to he tried to explain that animals evolved such programs so they were able to utilize physical changes via a learning algorithm so here’s the actual quote this is I quoted it back in episode 38 but let me give you an extended version of the quote this is from objective knowledge page 275 to 278 now it seems clear this is Carl Popper that in a complicated organism almost all accidental mutations will be disadvantageous they will thus be eliminated by natural selection this will hold special force for accidental mutations affecting more than one organ he uses the example of the software of the autopilot system

[01:23:45]  Red: keep in mind that an autopilot system back then probably wasn’t a computer software it’s probably a system that did some sort of checking and then trying to rebalance things so you can think of it as soft today we would literally make it computer software but back then it may not have actually been computer software okay but this is why he had to use this example so he uses the example of the software of an autopilot versus say the wings on the plane now he says according to the monastic hypothesis what does he mean by the monastic hypothesis well this would be regular Darwinian neo -Darwinian evolution okay so according to the monastic hypothesis regular Darwinian evolution a favorable mutation of an organ say an increase in the power of one of the engines will always be used favorably and that is all there is to it any favorable mutation is improbable but its probability need not be vanishingly small but according to the dualistic hypothesis this is his hypothesis the idea that animals have learning algorithms and that this is fundamental to how evolution actually works a favorable change to an organ would in many cases be potentially favorable be only potentially favorable to make any difference the improvement would have to be used and this new use might depend on complementary accidental change in the central propensity that’s what Popper’s term was for the software of the nervous system which would be at the same time both independent and complementary must indeed be vanishing so he’s raising this issue how did evolution ever work how did you ever have evolution work where you have this idea that an animal’s born and it’s got like

[01:25:26]  Red: better hands or something like that and then it’s able to use it and it gives it an evolutionary advantage but in real life that would never happen like if you had a Boston Dynamic Robot that doesn’t have learning this is the example I used from episode 38 and you put a better engine inside of it even though the engine is better the software wasn’t wasn’t built with that engine so the whole robot’s going to fail so he’s raising this issue how is it that you can even have physical changes evolve in the first place

[01:25:59]  Red: using the standard evolutionary theory the monastic hypothesis so he then offers his quote radical view he explains why this isn’t a problem under his theory the dualistic hypothesis because we can imagine skills and abilities in software simply evolving independently prior to the physical changes that later then get co -opted so Popper then explains his radical proposal quote once a new aim or tendency or disposition or a new skill or a new way of behaving so we’re talking about the software has evolved in the quote central propensity structure that’s obviously the software of the nervous system he just never calls it that because that wasn’t a term back in 1961 this fact will include the effects of natural selection in such a way that previously unfavorable though potentially favorable mutations become actually favorable if they support the new established tendency but this means that the evolution of executive organs will become directed by this tendency or aim of the software and thus goal directed page 278 that’s Carl Popper this is exactly what Michael Evans talking about Carl Popper back in 1961 actually anticipated the whole thing now once a mutation like this is established another mutation this is Carl Popper another mutation which makes the skill structure more flexible may become more favorable and by such mutations of the skill structure the organism might acquire propensity to learn in the sense of improving its skills by trial and error so Popper is explaining that evolution really only makes sense if evolution had a tendency towards creating learning algorithms therefore we should expect evolution physical evolution to be rooted in learning algorithms from the ground up from the beginning this is a really Popper saw this as a radical proposal and he says I admit this is a radical proposal I know I’m kind of out there in objective knowledge Michael Evans showing that he was right that took decades later how many decades is it now quite a few decades between 1961 and today

[01:28:14]  Red: but this is actually what we’re really starting to find okay it’s an idea that I had only ever heard from Carl Popper but it makes an insane amount of sense to me if evolution had to adjust the software to account for each new hardware change as we would do with the Boston Dynamics Robots actually I think Boston Dynamics Robots today do have learning algorithms they didn’t back when I made episode 38 they often didn’t actually use learning algorithms it would just never work so there’s this intense evolutionary pressure to evolve learning algorithms this is exactly why it makes so much sense that you can explain life, cells and tissue in terms of their learning algorithms aka cell cognition like Michael Evans is doing but this is just an analogy I mean clearly we don’t mean to imply this is really a form of cognition

[01:29:09]  Red: surely we at least agree with Hancock that referring to cells as having cognition is just going too far well let’s consider what Michael Evans has to say about this consider this quote from one of Levin’s recent papers in this paper he takes a look at the fact that the processes we currently only associate with nervous systems actually evolved prior to the existence of the nervous system and are contained in the bioelectric systems that he has discovered quote from the abstract however the findings of evolutionary biology this is from the abstract developmental bioelectricity and synthetic bioengineering are revealing the ancient pre -neural roots of many mechanisms and algorithms occurring in brains the implication of which is that minds may have preceded brains okay let me see if I can explain why this is significant okay and it actually it makes so much sense it’s maybe a little shocking but it’s more this is by the way from brains and where else mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments brains where did nervous systems come from right they came from this bioelectric signals that the cells use that that Levin has discovered that affect the morphology right so what are brains what are nervous systems they’re bioelectric signals

[01:30:29]  Red: there’s nothing out of the ordinary with this idea that nervous systems use bioelectricity to coordinate the animal the organism you know and that’s what brains and nervous systems do but that had to come from somewhere there had to be something that came before it that was similar enough to it that it could evolve into nervous systems well that is the bioelectricity of the cells the bioelectricity between the cells the intelligent collective intelligence of the cells it’s much slower than brains okay he says it’s more on the matter of minutes instead of you know milliseconds but this he’s saying in this paper that everything that you would think of as being part of the nervous system or the brain all of those same mechanisms exist in animals that don’t have brains because all cells have these in multi cellular animals have these so there is even possible implications for consciousness studies the paper points out that many theories of consciousness are built on various assumptions about brain specific activities we now need to either eliminate those theories because it would make brain free animals also conscious or we need to accept that there is and there isn’t a need for nervous systems to be conscious for what it’s worth I think the first is the correct answer I don’t believe animals without nervous systems are conscious you know but maybe I’m wrong who knows the key point here is everything that brains do today already existed in a simpler form prior to brains very far back in evolutionary time and this is what Levin is discovering with his bioelectricity and cell collective intelligence

[01:32:07]  Red: another interesting aspect of Levin’s philosophy is it’s ties to the paparian concept of corroboration so let me actually get some quotes here this is from bioletric fields a paradigm shift in biology the easiest way to explain this is in terms of not not having pre commitments to arm chair philosophy philosophical positions but instead to formulate your theories as adjudicatable via empirical evidence for example now here’s the quote from Levin at 52 minutes and 38 seconds this is a question to Levin to Levin actually can we train the weather as an agent well you know your view then is I guess you’d say even the weather has a mind Levin answers this crazy sounding question answer this crazy sounding question makes explicit why making your theories testable always trumps philosophical commitments he says well I don’t say that it does I say that it might now the question is could we do an experiment so for example you have I don’t know a tornado or some kind of weather system we could in theory do an experiment if we had the tools to do it we could in theory test whether they habituate habituates a kind of learning algorithm that cells are known to do we could in theory test the proposition can you train a dynamical system and you know that might sound crazy how would you train a hurricane or something but all of us are just a kind of dynamical system right now now we are certainly

[01:33:41]  Red: we have some qualities that hurricanes and things like that don’t have but again it’s a spectrum it isn’t a categorical difference and we are all temporary dynamical systems in metabolical space and things like that and we can learn it’s entirely possible that if we had a way to simulate stimulate weather patterns in a particular way you might find that wow there really is some kind of habituation here some kind of sensitization here now a couple of things to say one is that we’ve done this with molecular pathways this is why I was saying earlier that I don’t think cells are the bottom level because all it takes is half a dozen genes interacting with each other to show associative learning meaning Pavlovian conditioning so this is why he thinks that cells aren’t the bottom level that learning algorithms exist lower than a cell like that’s it you don’t need the rest of the cell you don’t need anything else just from the math alone for just a few interactive subunits you can already give this to you so could weather patterns do it could ecosystems do it I mean if I had a $10 bet right now I would probably say they can but we cannot assume that we need to do experiments

[01:35:04]  Red: so my point this is now Michael Levin why intelligence isn’t limited to brains at 3531 so my point is simply this we have to be humble about the fact that we don’t know how to just you know notice these things and they are not you can’t have philosophical feelings about it you have to do experiments and see what that does for you let’s make it super practical this is now from biological fields paradigm shift in biology 2007 let’s make it super practical okay because some of these philosophical things can be debated endlessly and that causes people to dismiss them I want to make make it I want to make it extremely practical let’s do this let’s agree that for all of us the asset test of any new theory is whether they facilitate new applications in medicine new research and new discoveries so I’m not interested in philosophical theories that paint extra stuff into the onto the science because it makes us feel good my claim is I’m only going to say this I’m only going to say things I’m only going to pursue things that I think are actively making us do better science and which is empirically detectable new capabilities and new medical applications so that’s our goal okay so I want to be clear that’s my starting point

[01:36:23]  Red: so boom Michael levin is talking about the paparian concept of theories not being at hawk which to popper meant they had to have independently testable consequences this is popper’s theory of corroboration it’s actually not popper’s theory of corroboration it’s popper’s theory of falsification which is largely misunderstood falsification in popper has often been understood by fans of popper as being about justification ism and it is about justification ism but that’s not the main thing it’s about okay what falsification really is about is about what makes a superior theory what’s the nature of a superior theory I’ve often used the example of a theory of oranges stop scurvy versus vitamin c stop scurvy now these two theories are in fact correct so neither can truly ever be refuted but vitamin c stop scurvy is the better of the two theories particularly after corroborating oranges stop scurvy and then wanting to find out why that is precisely because it’s the riskier theory by which popper means it’s the theory that has more potential logical counter examples this idea that we prefer theories that are easier to be falsified that is what falsification ism is in popper’s epistemology it’s all about our choice to formulate a riskier, bolder or more empirically testable theory and thereby increase the content of your theory by increasing its reach

[01:37:49]  Red: and this is what levin is getting at the goal the goal is theories that say something about the world that might turn out to be incorrect that is to say that they can be falsified okay let me actually put this in a slightly different way that I’ve been thinking about this in popper we prefer a certain kind of theory we don’t prefer robust theories that are impossible to criticize or falsify we prefer brittle theories that really shouldn’t be standing up except they happen to be right that’s really what popper is about okay you want a really bold risky theory that really should be easy to show is wrong if it were actually wrong and that’s what falsification ism actually is this is why the whole debate over corroboration versus falsification never did make sense okay because falsification ism isn’t about justification ism it’s about the nature of the theory itself okay the brittle bold risky theory that we prefer

[01:38:52]  Red: um this is now from 14 season opener mic 11 on the new biology 20 to 11 if the answer from the actual experiment is actually it doesn’t help to think that cells or tissue are being intelligent agents at all then we give up and we say chemistry is the way to go and we continue status quo but what we found actually is that that’s not the case we’ve made numerous discoveries that by using these tools that operate on principles of looking for memories looking for goals looking for intelligence and so on these kinds of tools are are extremely they pay off they pay off wildly in developmental biology and for this that reason and regenerative medicine and so for that reason here’s my hypothesis it was very simple morphogenesis meaning the creation of the body it’s repaired during regeneration resistance to cancer aging and so on all of these things are the behavior of a collective intelligence in anatomical space the behavior and other hypothesis other hypotheses was that the intelligence in anatomical space could include the intelligence in the brain could include intelligence in the organs yeah I mean so it’s not controversial that we are collective intelligence of neurons operating in three -dimensional space right I mean that’s it and so he’s saying look it’s just I’m not really doing anything it’s all that radical compared to what we already accepted and we even know the glue we even know the cognitive glue that binds the individual neurons into a single unmodified mind that would be bioelectricity like in the brain my point is that the exact same thing happens in anatomical space and it’s and again the cognitive glue there is the biological network of the rest of the body

[01:40:37]  Red: now at 2056 now having started there here’s where we have to be fearless says Levin we cannot assume from a philosophical arm chair what the optimal way to deal with biomedical issues is from the level of chemistry that’s a common assumption but we have to be clear that’s an assumption we don’t actually know that if you’re going to going to be actually scientific about this you have to entertain the possibility that tools from other levels of organization and the tools I like best are the tools that come from cognitive science behavioral science and neuroscience some of these tools are going to be useful for what we need to do so my claim is very simple I’m going to take I’m going to appropriate from the neural and behavioral sciences tools having to do with memory learning and perceptual illusions top down control of executive goals over the chemistry all the molecular tools so all the ion channel channel kind of things opto optogenetics all the neurotransmitter drugs you know the active inference framework I’m going to steal all of that stuff from behavioral science and I’m going to simply ask what does it what does it do for us to look at the control of the body control of body shape and function if the answer is that it doesn’t help at all then we give up and we say chemistry is the way to go and we continue with the status quo

[01:42:03]  Red: so let’s look back now at Zach Hancock’s claim from his video at one hour 17 minutes 19 seconds words like intentionality, purpose and agency to me really have no place in evolutionary biology especially when evolution is being explained to the general public because they have a tendency to confuse and give false impressions at 18 -1 -18 -03 my point is that it simply isn’t necessary to use such loaded words as they indicate completely trivial concepts in the first place and only act to spread confusion about how evolution actually works at one hour 55 minutes 11 seconds Shapiro thinks terms like agency and purpose are themselves driving forces that are not merely emergent properties of chemicals but are something special if you didn’t know about Levin’s work Hancock’s claims seem rather reasonable to me but Levin’s work is a counter example to Hancock’s claims that show that Hancock is mistaken using terms like purpose, goal and agency is how Michael Levin came up with a new way of looking at evolution and biology and found the bioelectric field of cells of an organism and then used that to communicate and set goals and solve problems it is how Levin showed that trying to force fit everything into evolution into the emergent properties of chemicals to quote Hancock was causing biologists to miss an entire level of emergence

[01:43:28]  Red: so I want to go back to a statement Hancock made about Shapiro’s theory of natural genetic engineering at one hour 18 minutes 20 seconds he says the biochemist James Shapiro argues that organisms direct their own evolution that is they do so by directly modifying their own DNA Shapiro calls this natural genetic engineering if it is true it would certainly be a non -trivial action of purpose indeed if an organism if organisms were capable of modifying their own DNA in service of adaption it would be a remarkable departure from modern synthetic the modern synthetic paradigm now none of the experiments from Levin involved natural genetic evolution none of the ones I just went over none of them involved natural genetic evolution so it might argue here that Hancock has been corroborated by Levin’s experiments here but at this point Hancock’s whole point seems entirely deflated okay if we did find that the organism contained software to rearrange genes to adapt not unlike the planaria that grew its head a new head in barium would it really be all that different from what we learned from Levin’s experiments it’s possible that Shapiro is entirely wrong about natural genetic engineering indeed there may be no need for it if the tissue itself can intelligently learn without genes so in fact I have heavy suspicions that natural genetic engineering NGE is a dead end I think Shapiro’s probably wrong about it okay with maybe a few specific counter examples that he raises I suspect that in general it plays very little role in how evolution works I could be wrong about that by the way but I’m just saying nothing in Levin’s experiments really involved it but it’s hard to miss that Levin has spiritually made the very same point that Shapiro did Shapiro noticed an overlooked problem and proposed maybe a wrong solution to it but he was right about the problem and that people were overlooking it I think Hancock proved correct that neo -Darwinian evolution has evolved into the price equations which are energy neutral because of this Hancock’s technically correct that this is a more universal understanding of neo -Darwinism and really isn’t threatened by any of the third way or anything Michael Levin’s doing yet Hancock got the single most important thing wrong there is room for a whole new paradigm in evolutionary biology for both thinking about cells as agents and to stop thinking every aspect of biology in terms of genes controlling chemicals ironically it was this intense desire to quote not mislead the public that in fact misled the entire field of biology to miss this new paradigm so even if Shapiro is wrong about natural genetic engineering

[01:46:25]  Red: which he may well be and even if Noble is wrong about Lamarquez and being back which I think surely he is they were right about this point that the field is stuck in a reductionist mindset that is undermined progress in really important things like even cancer research once you realize this it really seems to me like game set match it almost doesn’t matter how many more points Hancock scores here or how he was for the most part correct and Noble was for the most part off base this war was really about if biological evolutionists had fallen into rigid thinking that was causing them to miss important aspects of biology or evolution Zach Hancock or Jerry Coyne was arguing no that isn’t the case and all it takes to refute their view is a single counter example in this case we’ve got one Michael Evans research program it’s a case of literally Hancock winning every battle every single battle and then losing the war that is exactly what has happened in my opinion that’s why I’m saying I’m going to take a definitive stance on this you might still be wondering what any of this has to do with the problem of open -endedness or even AGI well maybe nothing okay my interest is AGI I’m exploring all sorts of different paths most of which are probably going to be dead ends

[01:47:49]  Red: until we have a falsifiable theory of open -endedness or AGI it is uncertain what connects to what but think about Levin’s theory from a 30,000 foot level he’s claiming that the reason evolution works as well as it does is because there are levels of intelligence learning algorithms all the way down when evolution makes a mutation the next level up can decide how to deal with that problem this is one of the reasons that plasticity works plasticity is well accepted okay but this is why it works there is as Donald Campbell imagined a hierarchy or maybe more like a web of blind variation and selective retention algorithms that interact this is Campbell created the idea of downward causation based on this okay he’s the one who coined that term so biological evolution is thus evolution of evolution of evolution so to speak so have you ever actually seen an AI or ML algorithm try to model genetic evolution as anything but the simplistic and reductionist genes eye view of evolution that’s just the way it’s always done so at a minimum this shows that we’ve missed something important about evolution and thus can’t really replic and that may be one of the reasons why we can’t really replicate yet with an algorithm due to this of course this may not turn out to be true

[01:49:10]  Red: this not turn out to be the thing we missed about evolution it may be a thing we missed about evolution there could be other things but this is definitely a case where it’s definitely worth a look right at a minimum this is an interesting new direction in biological evolution where we start to think of cells and tissue as being learning algorithms and start to really think about how learning algorithms just like Karl Popper said are keyed understanding how evolution works that’s not something I think I’ve seen anywhere else other than basically Karl Popper and then maybe arguably Dennis Noble and then Michael Levin right um so I think this is really why I feel like I can actually take a pretty strong stance here Levin’s work really does show that there’s something wrong and what a new interesting direction is whether that then turns into solving the problem of open -endedness or AGI not as sure but you could see how maybe it could right you could see how because there’s this giant hierarchy of learning algorithms maybe open -endedness comes out of not a single learning algorithm but like a group of learning algorithms that’s not an impossibility right maybe that is something that needs to be in our heads as we start to think about how to create that solve the problem of open -endedness something that we could learn from how evolution actually works alright that’s that’s my thoughts

[01:50:42]  Blue: well Bruce you’re on your own unique path in life and I I love listening to you and it’s it’s a it’s a trip I’ll say that but thank you for your thoughts here and I’ll look forward to listening again while while I edit

[01:51:00]  Red: alright thank you very much

[01:51:10]  Blue: hello again if you’ve made it this far please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes as you probably know we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch theory of knowledge we believe David Deutsch’s four strands tie everything together so we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art and especially the search for artificial general intelligence also please consider connecting with Bruce on X at B Nielsen 01 also please consider joining the Facebook group the many worlds of David Deutsch where Bruce and I first started connecting thank you

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