Some new content. First, a few recent talks given at our Center: bioelectric hydra, exploratory learning in networks, evolution of viruses, & mechanisms of neural self-organization:






Then, recent conversations on toxinology (@TNWJackson) & biological hacking, active inference of self-organizing data, and computation in biology:




thoughtforms.life/on-biology-and…

This thread discussed whether applying cognitive terms to things other than brains (e.g., cell swarms during morphogenesis) is inflationary. I do a careful argument about it here and here , but

https://twitter.com/Caldwbr/status/1759284760336060599

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.338… just briefly, my view on this category error claim. First, cards on the table: I think that the only judge of how correct an idea/approach/category is whether it helps discovery, drives advances, enables novel capabilities. I work in synthetic morphology, regenerative medicine,

Back in the day, there was an interesting interface: the ouija board. People who used it knew that whoever you were talking to 1) was not necessarily human, 2) may or may not be embodied, and if it was, that embodiment was in a space very different from ours, 3) could not be trusted necessarily, because they lie, bullshit, confabulate, & make mistakes like the rest of us but often in very different ways & with hard-to-understand motivations. There was a set of concepts around dealing w/ other minds in highly diverse implementations, without assuming

new #preprint, @OSFramework , happy to have this out the door, been working on it for a while.
"Darwin’s Agential Materials: evolutionary implications of multi-scale competency in developmental biology"
osf.io/p23se/ In prior papers, I argued for morphogenesis as a kind of collective intelligence navigating anatomical morphospace with various competencies. I proposed a few ways in which evolution scales up from single cells' tiny goals to agents with larger goals (e.g., specific target

Whenever reviewers/editors suggest drastically reducing the # of references, or shortening content to fit "length limits" (for a digital end product!), I get closer to the ledge that was established by preprints. Why spend time begging to be allowed to include citations to prior work to give proper credit and give readers a good path to read backwards, why wrangle over edits that distort one's message, why reduce the length of what we wanted to say, all for the privilege of paying thousands of $ to have it eventually "blessed" by a very small

I'm increasingly noticing (in manuscript reviews & comments after a talk) the claim that empirical success in predictions & driving new capabilities/discoveries is no evidence that a theory is any good. Please educate me on the philosophy of science that is driving this view: what is the alternative? Of course we can be temporarily fooled by fit to data (e.g., epicycles), and that the Newtonian worldview gave way to Einstein's and so on. But big picture: if not judged by empirical success, what else do we have? Unless a paper/talk is claiming

new preprint! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
@SantoshManicka @pai_vaibhav
Information integration during bioelectric regulation of morphogenesis in the embryonic frog brain. In past work, we've found a specific bioelectric pattern (nature.com/articles/s4146…) required for normal brain development. Downstream of this are all the transcriptional cascades required for a good brain. But here's the key: the correct bioelectric state for proper gene expression is a *spatial pattern* - it's not the state of single cells, the transcriptional circuits are regulated

I present to you, some images that Midjourney created from some scientific paper titles. I think maybe this should be required with every paper submission to a journal. Let's see some of your favorites! "The spirit of D'Arcy Thompson dwells in empirical morphospace" (one of my all-time favorite paper titles)
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

So what's the deal with Substack? I've got some things to write that are too long for tweets, and are not traditional academic papers. I don't have a blog. Inspired by @erikphoel and @BenAnderson421 to consider Substack or something like it. The problem is that I don't have the time to put out content very frequently or very consistently. It will be occasional, unpredictable. Does that make it a bad candidate for Substack? I could send some of these things to ~science magazines, but I have no time to wrestle with editors. How do people think about

I've played with GPT Chat, and I'm kind of annoyed at how hard it tries to avoid "misinformation". I get it, we don't want to drown in a sea of nonsense. But when I ask for an imaginative (fiction) text, I get 1 useful line and 4 sentences of disclaimers about how this is so weird - it's somehow truncating all my tweet threads now and only posting the first 1 or 2. I was trying to say:

Ok some more Midjourney tests:

anatomical compiler
(didn't capture that well) Platonic ideal of a paramecium
(no clue what I expected to see)

I know I'm very late to this party, but here's my recent fooling around with Midjourney (via Discord):

"scientific diagram of a cell influencing the cells around it" "sparse diagram of a single cell influencing a few other cells"

Alright GPT chat: Write a prompt for the Stable Diffusion engine to draw a diagram of something interesting on the topic of an alien religious artifact being used in a ceremony by non-humanoid aliens. Answer: "Draw a diagram of an alien religious ceremony in which a group of non-humanoid aliens use an ancient artifact known as the "Cosmic Mirror." The artifact is a large, reflective surface made of a shimmering, metallic substance. It is said to have the ability to reveal the truth

@ricard_sole @manlius84 @sanewman1 Here's my take, adding to some interesting things that have been said on this. I think the big mystery, magnificence, and biomedical promise of morphogenesis is *not* simply that complex anatomies emerge from the protein-level hardware spec of the DNA. If that were all it was, @ricard_sole @manlius84 @sanewman1 then the biochemistry/genetics approaches, augmented with complexity theory, causal emergence, etc. could eventually handle this. But it's way more than the feedforward, open-loop diagram that people often draw from genotype to phenotype. It's way more than "more is different",

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

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.…

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

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

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

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

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