The universe and serendipity are amazing things. Besides Nick Lane’s ideas and evidence, I wound up listening a David Levin’s interview just now and it’s another kick me on butt experience. I’ve been familiar with him for a number of years, and his talks have always captured my attention, and he does not disappoint in this recent interview.
Where Biology Goes Off the Rails - Dr. Michael Levin, DemystifySci #369
Oct 1, 2025 DemystifySci Podcast
Michael Levin is a synthetic biologist at Tufts University who believes that asking questions about “life” is a fruitless project. Instead, he argues that we ought to be trying to understand the emergence of cognition - a feature that he believes appears long before cells emerge. As part of this project, Levin has started to pull on a series of threads woven through the origin of life debate that seem to show basic elements of thinking systems - habituation, sensitization, conditioning - can be found in simple physical networks. We dig into how these systems work, what they reveal about life, and how his approach to understanding nature resolves a lot of biological paradoxes.
00:00 Go!
00:05:11 Exploring the Origins and Definitions of Life
00:11:30 The Complexity of Defining Life
00:14:30 The Limitations of Scientific Categories
00:17:58 Re-evaluating Life and Cognition
00:19:40 Theoretical Perspectives on Life
00:20:08 The Spectrum of Cognition and the Re-enchantment of Nature
00:24:09 Experimental Approaches to Understanding Cognition in Networks
00:30:14 Feedback Loops in Learning and Causal Emergence
00:35:34 The Role of Chemical Interactions in the Origins of Life
00:39:27 Discussion on Learning and Molecular Networks
00:41:35 The Nature of Complexity and Consciousness
00:45:04 Science and the Crisis of Meaning
00:49:34 Expanding Compassion in Understanding Life
00:54:13 Methodology of Chemical Experimentation
00:58:53 Analysis at Different System Levels
01:01:56 Causal Powers of Networks
01:04:31 Collective Intelligence in Biological Systems
It would be so cool if someone found something in this video they’d like to discuss. What they heard him say and what thoughts they might have, add or take away.
I would enjoy discussing Levin’s statements in some detail, interested outside feedback can be so refreshing.
As for this particular video, for me, as a footnote to Nick Lane’s final paragraph, it was like fireworks. Levin and his team have managed to take rational understanding to another, yet another yet level.
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41:30
… The fact that you can be surprised that networks of chemicals do this that’s fine. I was surprised too, kind of, I mean we did the work because I kind of felt like this would happen.
So, it’s okay, it’s surprising, and amazing. But when people say: “I’m surprised that we humans do it, (I think) like why? What do you think you’re made of? You’re made of the same chemicals.
And so the fact that people think, “we’re more complex.” What does that do for you? We don’t know? There’s this assumption that just because you’re more complex, you know, complexity is it sort of hides the multitude of sins. Like why? …