Share this page!

Michael Levin Profile picture
Twitter logo
Sep 2 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Ok here are my top pics for #books in the life sciences. There are many more good ones, I had to make hard choices to get it to a manageable number. Not saying I agree with everything in every book - these are ones that stretch thinking in useful ways.
Some are very old; they have important ideas you will not find in modern sources. I will also put this list up on my website and add to it. Possibly links will be added later, and eventually some top picks in other fields as well. Sorry, I know it would be great to have a blurb
each one; I just don't have the time. In no particular order:
Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb

The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul by Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg

The Elements of Experimental Embryology by Gavin de Beer and Julian Huxley

The Tinkerer's Accomplice by J. Scott Turner
The Extended Organism by J. Scott Turner

How the Leopard Changed Its Spots by Brian Goodwin

Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner

Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems by Andreas Wagner

The Origins of Evolutionary Innovations by Andreas Wagner
At Home in the Universe by Stuart A. Kauffman

The Origins of Order by Stuart A. Kauffman

An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine by Claude Bernard

The Touchstone of Life by Werner R. Loewenstein

Behavior and Evolution by Jean Piaget
A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans by Jakob Johann von Uexkull

On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

The Ideas of Biology by John Tyler Bonner

On Development by John Tyler Bonner
Blueprint For Immortality: The Electric Patterns of Life by Harold Saxton Burr

Life Itself by Robert Rosen

The Integrated Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga and Joseph E. LeDoux

The Principles of Psychology by William James
Principles of Physiology by William James

The Directiveness of Organic Activities by E.S. Russell

Design for a Brain by W. R. Ashby

Behavior of the lower organisms by H. S. Jennings

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Michael Levin

Michael Levin Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @drmichaellevin

Michael Levin Profile picture
Aug 31
Buckle up - here are some highlights (very interesting reading) from my last 3 weeks: (as always, apologies to those authors who have Twitter handles and aren't tagged - didn't have time to look everyone up):
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28137748
@KoseskaL
dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnana.…
doi.org/10.1038/s41586…
Read 22 tweets
Michael Levin Profile picture
Aug 1
Excited to share this preprint, with student @niwhskal : arxiv.org/abs/2207.14729. Genotypes mostly do not code directly for phenotypes, ok. But what implications for evolution of the *competency* of cells, within the developmental physiology that forms the “hidden layers” between
genome+environment (input) and form+function (output)? We analyzed minimal simulations of evolution of virtual embryos where cells have different levels of local autonomy prior to fitness evaluation (like reviewed in mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/6…). Lots of interesting aspects, but key
is: the more cellular competency, the less well evolution can see the genome, which reduces ability to select good genotypes – vicious cycle. What happens then? Most of the effort goes into increasing the competency. A sort of evolutionary ratchet for #BasalIntelligence. Also, an
Read 5 tweets
Michael Levin Profile picture
Jul 2
Some of the best papers from this week's stack: (testing a new format for this, 🧵):

doi.org/10.1016/bs.ctd…
@OdedRechavi
Can brain activity transmit transgenerationally?
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35173338
"embodied energy" in robotics
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35142418 - review of Child's theory of metabolic regionalisation in developmental and regenerative patterning
@WillsLabFroggos
Read 11 tweets
Michael Levin Profile picture
Jun 16
New paper @pai_vaibhav: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/wr… #bioelectric repair of eye, heart, and gut defects from a range of chemical teratogens and even from mutations of a key neurogenesis gene Notch! Molecular or drug (human-approved) methods repair defects in multiple germ layers. 🧵:
Super excited about this; here's context of how we got here via Pai's prior papers, & ties of this biomed-focused project to basal cognition field. Regulative development or regeneration needs to be able to ascertain correct vs. incorrect morphologies. How could cell groups do
that? Model nature.com/articles/s4159… but basically, think of image recognition by visual systems - can other body tissues act like retinas to process bioelectric info? We originally looked at the voltage prepatterns in the nascent frog brain and saw that teratogens screw up brain
Read 11 tweets
Michael Levin Profile picture
Jan 29
Loving this old paper by H. J. Carter: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… on the behavior of various microbiota. 1) Tons of vocabulary words here that I don’t know. 2) When I said out loud that it was from 1860’s, my kid said “Let me guess, it just finally got published now?”. Someone 1/n
must have overheard my complaining about how long review takes... 3) Now that journals can be digital and we don’t have to worry about expense of paper printing, can we go back to being able to write in this style: “I have never until lately given the amount of attention 2/n
to it that I have long since done to the other fresh water Rhizopoda, both naked and testaceous. … In the evening of the 2nd of June, 1858, in Bombay, … my eye fell upon….” 3/n
Read 4 tweets
Michael Levin Profile picture
Jan 28, 2021
I am floored; not the first time this has happened, blows my mind each time. Contacted by 2 high-school kids who read some of my papers and wanted to talk about the bioelectrics of cancer and the scaling of the self (e.g., frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…). I set up a Zoom. WHOA - 1/n
they had read a bunch of the primary papers, annotated everything to incredible detail with ideas, and asked better questions than I get after most seminars. They had found all the weak points, connected some of the subtle findings with other work in developmental biology, 2/n
re-framed and applied the idea of changing computational boundary of the self during development vs. carcinization, to ask: if anatomical homeostasis can be extended as a kind of cognitive process, as I've claimed, what is beyond that - turn that same conceptual crank 3/n
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(