Michael Levin

Wordpress site is up - thoughtforms.life. Register to be notified of book progress, specific events, news, and new posts with photography, essays, interviews, & more. Unlike at drmichaellevin.org, here I will post ideas not fully baked yet, & academic-adjacent content.

@Marsagenesis @addyman_michael @Rizstanford 😆😆

@drmichaellevin @addyman_michael @Rizstanford Sorry, you don’t get a spokesperson, you get peer reviews.

Who should speak for Earth if Aliens show up 👽?? My answer: anyone except for these politicians - and no musicians either!!

@kanair Hmm I may be missing something but why not offer it a nutritious but not tasty food. If it eats, the answer is yes. If it doesn’t, the answer is no. Wouldn’t that work?

A random question. Could we ever ask a mouse a simple Yes/No question? I don't mean training them to press a "Yes" or "No" button for a reward. I mean genuinely asking something like "Are you hungry right now?" and getting a real answer. Is that possible?

@addyman_michael @Rizstanford Sure, I’m here, I’m visiting, so who wants to speak to me on behalf of humanity?

@Rizstanford Doc....@drmichaellevin you're up.

Call for papers for 'Artificial Life for Science and Engineering' We seek work applying ALife concepts and tools to model real-world systems and engineer solutions—and assist scientific discovery through open-ended and curiosity-driven search. Call info: alifeforscience.github.io

@ebarenholtz thoughtforms.life/are-we-too-par… (images made for me by the inimitable Jeremy Guay) also, link.springer.com/article/10.100…

If neurons could think, they’d assume they were the top layer of agency. But we’re cells too — in societies, ecosystems, the biosphere. What are language and culture if not the hormonal systems of a mind we’re too embedded in to perceive?

@opeksoy I've been super busy, thanks for the reminder! Ok here goes:

@drmichaellevin no pictures lately? :)

A new mechanism for “RNA memory”! 😱 Thrilled to share another crazy paper from the lab (can’t believe we posted 2 in 2 days!), summarizing >10 years of research: Work on transgenerational inheritance of small RNAs in the powerful model organism C. elegans changed how we think about what’s possible in inheritance and evolution, because it allows the most heretical thing: inheritance of parental responses to the environment! However, it’s still unclear whether RNAs are inherited across generations in other animals, largely because the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases that amplify heritable small RNAs and prevent their dilution in C. elegans are not conserved in mammals. In this new work, an amazing collaboration with the Rink and Wurtzel labs, we show that planarians establish long-lasting and heritable small RNA–based gene regulatory states despite lacking canonical RNA-dependent RNA polymerases and nuclear RNAi machinery (that are required in C. elegans). You might say “they are both worms…” BUT planarians are evolutionarily very distant from C. elegans (flatworms vs. roundworms, diverged more than 500 million years ago), making this particularly surprising. These are totally different animals. We find that ingestion of double-stranded RNA induces sequence-specific silencing that persists for months and survives repeated cycles of whole-body regeneration. Even more strikingly, RNAi can be transferred between animals, echoing James V. McConnell’s controversial “RNA memory” experiments from the 1970s (his lab was targeted by the Unabomber terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who sent McConnell a bomb. This and other controversies ended this line of experiments…) Mechanistically, we find that the response transitions from a transient systemic dsRNA-triggered phase to a stable, cell-autonomous post-transcriptional “memory phase” maintained by antisense small RNAs. Using a new luminescence reporter (transgenesis is currently impossible in planarians), we show that silencing spreads along the targeted gene and identify a weird type of planarian small RNAs with untemplated polyA tails. RNAi inheritance without canonical RdRPs establishes planarians as a powerful system for studying RNA-based regulatory inheritance beyond C. elegans and raises the possibility that RNA-mediated inheritance may be more broadly conserved in animals, potentially even in mammals. Here’s a video of a planarian that is treated by RNAi against β-catenin and develops multiple heads instead of just one. This is one of the phenotypes that is inherited. Another phenotype is “loss of eyes” (which we show is not only inherited across multiple regeneration cycles, but can also be transmitted between animals in transplantation experiments). Amazing work led by first authors Prakash Cherian and Idit Aviram (co-supervised by Omri and me). Please read the preprint, the link is in the next tweet, and share!

@wschroll Some more info on biological radical improvisation: mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/6… cell.com/trends/genetic…

While biological science made great progress with the concept of mechanism, and with conceiving the #organism as an entangled meta mechanism … it is all more “sloppy”, field like. And this trait is part of the emergent symphony. See also @drmichaellevin

Final version is out: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10… @YanboZhang3, @BeneHartl, and @HananelHazan "Heuristically Adaptive Diffusion-Model EvolutionaryStrategy" Abstract: Diffusion Models (DMs) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) share a core generative principle: iterative refinement of random initial distributions to produce high-quality solutions. DMs degrade and restore data using Gaussian noise, enabling versatile generation, while EAs optimize numerical parameters through biologically inspired heuristics. Our research integrates these frameworks, employing deep learning-based DMs to enhance EAs across diverse domains. By iteratively refining DMs with heuristically curated databases, we generate better-adapted offspring parameters, achieving efficient convergence toward high-fitness solutions while preserving explorative diversity. DMs augment EAs with deep memory, retaining historical data and exploiting subtle correlations for refined sampling. Classifier-free guidance further enables precise control over evolutionary dynamics, targeting specific genotypical, phenotypical, or population traits. This hybrid approach transforms EAs into adaptive, memory-enhanced frameworks, offering unprecedented flexibility, and precision in evolutionary optimization, with broad implications for generative modeling and heuristic search.

@alexwg @KyleMcnease Likewise 🙏 I need to check this out, it looks very cool!

@KyleMcnease @drmichaellevin I always enjoy chatting with @drmichaellevin.

“It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move.” I hope you’re at least trying to consult with @drmichaellevin to get feedback

I’m delighted to share our paper in The Lancet Psychiatry - ‘AI-associated delusions and large language models: risks, mechanisms of delusion co-creation, and safeguarding strategies’ authors.elsevier.com/a/1mjMp7tf1dCg…

This specific journal (like a couple of others) has a special format, where someone writes a target paper, a bunch of people are set up to write specific reactions to it, and then the author writes a single response doc to all the comments. Other journals do publish reviewers' comments (it's not the same thing as the targeted article+commentary).

@drmichaellevin Replies ? That's new. What's that all about ? Also like this feature, should we also publish replies to journal reviewers and their comments /questions published ?

Replies to the comments on sciencedirect.com/science/articl… is now out here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… "From complementarity to non-duality: Seeing objects and processes as pragmatic constructs"

Thank you very much for the talk and discussion - looking forward to part 2!

@AtticDaddy Is it paywalled? I clicked on the link with an anonymous browser and I see the whole (short) reply paper, I don't think it's paywalled.

@drmichaellevin Do you have a link that’s not paywalled?

@MitoPsychoBio @btr_fs @JAMAPsych hey Martin! It's been too long. Definitely, let's do it - I'm emailing you.

@btr_fs @JAMAPsych @drmichaellevin Love @drmichaellevin and his work. I'm sure we'll converge for a recorded discussion at some point.

In #MajorDepressiveDisorder, shared brain and blood biomarkers indicate disrupted mitochondrial metabolism, neurodevelopment, inflammation, transcription, and apoptotic pathways, highlighting potential biomarker and treatment targets. 🔗 ja.ma/3ORnBVE

Do you need to understand the world to survive in it? A classic 1970 cybernetics theorem says yes: "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system." But proving this mathematically for complex, unpredictable real-world scenarios has always been notoriously difficult. 2/5 In a new paper, "The Algorithmic Regulator" (published in Entropy), I tackle this using Algorithmic Information Theory and Kolmogorov Complexity. 🧠💻 It takes the classic Good Regulator Theorem and the Internal Model Principle and complements and extends them for non-linear, deterministic systems. 3/5 The paper looks at regulation as data compression. The proof shows that if a regulator successfully keeps a system (embedded in the world) stable (reducing the algorithmic complexity of its output), it mathematically must share "mutual algorithmic information" with the world with high probability. The key result: K(W∣R)mdpi.com/1099-4300/28/3…

very simple. nothing was intentionally blocked, there's no conspiracy. It's just that biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics sucked up everyone's interest because it was possible to make huge advances in *dead* (fractionated) tissue - low-hanging fruit. All the attention, young researchers' focus, and money went there because the tools and concepts didn't exist to make similar sized progress in live (4D) physiology. Bioelectricity, just like biomechanics, is just harder than biochemistry and it's taken longer to reach escape velocity.

@aasthajs @drmichaellevin right, so the question is, how / why was the bioelectric paradigm blocked?

Before @drmichaellevin why was bioelectricity not taken seriously? I know one answer is the dominance of the “gene-centric” paradigm in biology. But is there something else I’m missing?

@MadHermitHimbo @aasthajs one or two: drmichaellevin.org/presentations/

@drmichaellevin @aasthajs Do you have any audio or video lectures or rants that I could listen to?

@MillerLabMIT @niko_kukushkin @dimitrispp 🤘🤘🤘

@drmichaellevin @niko_kukushkin I mainly talk about bioelectricity and mesoscale function but electric waves can also fine tune the brain's structure on the microlevel doi.org/10.1016/j.pneu… work led by @dimitrispp and directly inspired by @drmichaellevin

@drmichaellevin + @MillerLabMIT = most important conversation happening in biological sciences today. Electricity is the frontier.