Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I bet that most of us out here have had the experience of

trying to put together a bookshelf or something like that from IKEA or from wherever some

somewhat complicated piece of furniture or something to have around the house for which you get

blueprints, instructions as well as pieces, the raw materials, right? And so we have a certain paradigm in mind about how something

complicated like a bookshelf comes to be, there's a blueprint, set of instructions, there's stuff that we're going to put together, and there's some agent us that does that work.

It's very natural then because we're familiar with that kind of process to think that something like that also happens when you put together a living organism, right?

When you put together a person or a whale or a tree, there is some blueprint set of instructions which presumably is in the DNA, right?

in the genome of the organism. And then there is some agents putting them together presumably the proteins that get their information from the DNA via the RNA, and they go off and they build things and voila, you get an organism.

So it turns out it's almost not at all like that pretty much, okay?

It's some truth to the idea that there are instructions or information contained in our DNA that will go into constructing an organism such as a person.

But the actual process by which it happens is much more nuanced, much richer, not quite that simple paradigm we have in mind of an instruction kit and agent and some raw materials.

And partly that's because, you know, we are not intelligently designed, right? This whole system that we have in us of DNA, genome, RNA, proteins, the organs that we have, the cells in our body, this all evolved in the complicated process.

And whatever kinds of dynamics and process was important and useful as far as evolution is concerned is what we ended up using, okay?

It's not supposed to be code in a computer where it's carefully commented or anything like that. It's just what was thrown together and what eventually got used.

And as a result of that, biologists keep finding ways in which the morphology, the shape and the way things are put together in organisms,

comes to be in fun and different ways than you might expect from the simple Ikea paradigm.

So our guest today, Michael Levin, is a biologist at Tufts University. And it's actually a little bit difficult to describe what he specializes in because it's kind of many different projects that are all fascinating to me.

But in the overall space of talking about how information and physical dynamics come together to make organisms and all their different functions and things like that.

Not only does it help us understand the particular features of organisms that we know and love, but to someone like me who cares about emergence and different levels of description of reality, it's fascinating because we can start asking questions like at what point is a decision being made by an organism or by the processes that are going into making that organism.

Is it anything like a computer? Is there a separation between hardware and software? What is the role of memory? What is the role of dynamical processes? All these fun questions.

So we're going to be talking about how selves, how information and how organisms all fit together. I'm not sure that I am capable or qualified to draw a single unified theme from it, but I think you'll find that it's a fascinating conversation that touches on many kinds of things we've been talking about on mindscape for quite a while now.

So let's go.

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