I Think It's Crucial for Evolution

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The way that biological organisms work is not this sort of laplacian idea that you give me exactly the state right now, and i will tell you what direction to move in. I think biology has been trapped in this teleophobia, which, you knowis doing us a great diservice. And so i've argued that for regenerative medicine and jigistonn in our laband and others, it's driven a ton of work to not novel experiments that otherwise would not have been done.

As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of the big areas of study in this burgeoning field is the relationship between the basic bioinformatic building blocks (genes and proteins) to the macroscopic organism that eventually results. That relationship is not a simple one, as we’re discovering. Standard metaphors notwithstanding, an organism is not a machine based on genetic blueprints. I talk with biologist and information scientist Michael Levin about how information and physical constraints come together to make organisms and selves.

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Michael Levin received his Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology department at Tufts University, and serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His work on left-right asymmetric body structures is on Nature’s list of 100 Milestones of Developmental Biology of the Century.

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