How to Scale From a Collection of Competent Agents to a Single Agent

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How do you scale from a collection of competent agents to some sort of, unified, a single agent that is larger than the othert? So i actually have a model of thisof how this his this works. It has to do with these really important elements called gap so these are things that, these are proto synapses. This is what synapses were before they became modern, modern synapses. Theyre basically, think about like two submarine hatches under water, sort of docking and opening up a path that you can go o, from cell to sell. When you connect with these gap junctions, both cells get access to each other's internal milier. And all the med

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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