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Forms of life, forms of mind | Dr. Michael Levin | The struggle of the parts: how competition among organs in the body contributes to morphogenetic robustness

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You might think that all of the normal cells in your body are cooperating with each other. Not counting microbial infections, the occasional carcinogenic defection from the target morphology, mutant cells in your normal brain, or your baby’s cells that colonized you, it might seem that the vast majority of your own cells should be incentivized to cooperate with each other because they share the same genome. It turns out that this is not the case, and despite their identical genomes, your body is home to cells, tissues, and organs that have not forgotten their roots as individual agents that compete for resources – both metabolic and informational. But I think there’s more to this. Our computational work suggests that evolution sets up artificial scarcity within the body, in order to achieve robust embryogenesis, which may have implications for other large-scale systems composed of agential parts (discussed at the very end of this post). The concept of competition between organs during

Forms of life, forms of mind | Dr. Michael Levin | The struggle of the parts: how competition among organs in the body contributes to morphogenetic robustness Science/philosophy content , Text The struggle of the parts: how competition among organs in the body contributes to morphogenetic robustness Published by Mike Levin on March 30, 2024 You might think that all of the normal cells in your body are cooperating with each other. Not counting microbial infections, the occasional carcinogenic defection from the target morphology , mutant cells in your normal brain, or your baby’s cells th

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