The Markov Blanket: How Complex Systems Created Life

Big Biology celebrates its 100th episode! 

You’re only 100 once, and though we hope there will be many more episodes to come, we wanted to celebrate this milestone with something special. A recurring theme from many of our conversations with guests on the show has been agency. This is a BIG and oftentimes controversial topic in biology, and in this episode we try to pull together the different threads from our past guests’ approaches to agency and discuss what agency means and why we think it is so important for us to better understand it. 

We also hear from our recent addition to the podcast team, Cameron Ghalambor, who has very different thoughts on agency to Art and Marty, making for a fascinating discussion. 

Of course, we don’t have all the answers, but that’s never been what this show is about. It’s an invitation to think and converse about the biggest questions in biology. And that’s exactly what we do here.

Cover art by Keating Shahmehri
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