I got a question from an astute reader:

I picked this passage out of a book as an example to help raise a philosophical question about biology and purpose and intent:

There are many connected species that deal with dead animals in a river system. There are species in the water and species on the land. A kangaroo carcass on the river bank is cleaned up by land/air species like crows, flies and ants, while parts of the kangaroo that fall into the river are cleaned up by water species like eels and yabbies to prevent pollution.

-Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta

The phrase “to prevent pollution” at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Nowhere on any level that we know of is anyone or anything “intending” to prevent pollution here, by having eels and yabbies do this. The eels and yabbies certainly aren’t thinking “Aha, must prevent river pollution!”

So either
– Nothing and nobody is actually intending anything; the outcome (preventing pollution) just emerges … or perhaps is reinforced by the ecosystem continuing to thrive
or
– Something somewhere actually is intending this, but you and I have no access to it at our level of awareness or consciousness.

Does some entity have to have an “intent” in order for a living system to function like this?

I replied… Read more »

Assembly Theory and the Third Transition in Science

Before I describe Life as No One Knows It, I need to point out that Sara Imari Walker has achieved something extraordinarily difficult. Despite being a highly credentialed scientist with first class collaborators (including Lee Cronin, Paul Davies and her team at ASU), the task she’s undertaken is a scientific and cultural slalom run.

What she’s attempting in this book is almost impossible. But she does it anyway.

-Cultural and Institutional Resistance
Walker challenges a deeply entrenched narrative that “life is just physics and chemistry.” Media and journals endlessly repeat oversimplified origin-of-life theories. The topic is battle-scarred from debates over religion, philosophy, and meaning.

-Intellectual and Disciplinary Complexity
Physics, biology, information theory, and philosophy each have their own assumptions and gatekeepers. She has no safe camp — too philosophical for hard scientists, too scientific for philosophers.

-Scientific Isolation and Risk
There’s no consensus around life as an informational process. She’s building the plane while flying it. Aligning with any faction (like various evolution groups, ID or strong-AI) risks being pigeonholed or dismissed. In science, speculation outside accepted models risks being labeled fringe — yet explaining life without speculation is impossible. Read more »

Andrew Briggs started to write the book Human Flourishing just before COVID and then the world went mad. Since then, the world has gotten even madder and many people are clutching their smartphones, wringing their hands, managing their anxiety, or merely existing. What does it mean to flourish and what do people, relationships, and professions look like and feel like when they flourish?

In this book, authors Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss and painter Roger Wagner weave together a beautiful picture of the material and immaterial, the concrete and the spiritual. Included here is a reproduction of Roger Wagner’s painting It Keeps Me Seeking.

The original painting hangs in The Auckland Project Faith Museum: https://aucklandproject.org/attraction/faith-museum/

I sympathize with the pain of scientists losing their grants.

But… when you make a deal with the devil, you get the horns.

My own 20 years of self-funded scientific work has shown me that most scientists are government employees who’ve literally signed away their autonomy and freedom of speech. Scientists must be EXTREMELY vigilant about what they say and who they criticize.

Scientists across a dozen disciplines have privately told me that most papers in their field are BS. Most progress is made in spite of the system, not because of it. Science is a corrupt profession monopolized by politicians & bureaucrats.

I say this as a person who has never received a dime of tax-funded support. I have paid Open Access fees out of my own pocket and raised money for nonprofit and for-profit projects. A brilliant postdoc asked me for career advice. I replied: “Do NOT take any position that compromises your autonomy or freedom of speech.”

The only scientists who say what they really think are those who have somehow attained some form of financial independence. The scientists I most admire, I admire for their willingness to stand AGAINST the system… not for their participation IN the system.

~

The Evolution 2.0 Prize Submission AI GPT is designed to help you shape the best possible submission for the Evolution 2.0 Prize. It’s a specialized assistant programmed with the official rules, what our judges are looking for, and where many submissions go off track. When you bring your idea or paper here, the AI carefully reads it against the prize guidelines — looking not just at how interesting or creative it is, but whether it meets the very specific requirements the prize demands, like demonstrating a chemical system that generates, encodes, and decodes information without “cheating.” Read more »

Tim Howard interviews me and Sy Garte about our new paper with Stuart Kauffman The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences. Join us for a fascinating discussion about a new revolution underfoot in biology:

Read more »

1. Every theory of evolution is a theory of engineering. You can test any scientific theory by applying it to technology.
2. The central question in biology: “What does a cell know about itself?” Life directs its own evolution.
3. Three levels of causation: Chemicals (universal laws of physics), codes (local rules of language & logic), and consciousness (agency). Consciousness encodes information which controls chemistry.
4. Living things are conscious agents: A cell is not merely a machine, it is a self with the capacity to act.
5. Evolution harnesses identical principles across different domains such as technology, business, music, culture, and yes, biology.
6. Evolution is not random events. It’s response to random events.
7. Codes are evidence of free will.
8. Life is more resourceful, tenacious, and focused than it “should” be in a purely mechanical universe.
9. Science explores an orderly, mathematical, elegant, and beautiful world that is a window into the mind of an architect.
10. A solution to the Evolution 2.0 Prize will be as revolutionary as the discovery of the genetic code or the splitting of the atom. Bigger than Google, bigger than ChatGPT.

Read more »

Charles Munford hosts a lively discussion every month called “Agential Topics.” I was a guest and the group had a wide ranging enjoyable conversation. My paper “Biology Transcends the Limits of Computation” is the manifesto behind the Evolution 2.0 Prize. In this presentation I explain my wider thinking behind the paper as well as my personal journey that led me here. 

I explain how science has gotten cause and effect backwards – it’s not chemicals -> codes -> cognition, it’s cognition -> code -> chemicals; and if we are ever going to solve the information problem (or cancer, or viruses, or origin of life, or generate REAL AI) we are going to have to start with cognition and consciousness, which I believe are fundamental.

The extensive Q&A explores many adjacent topics: Read more »

Two of my favorite scientists, Michael Levin and Azra Raza with Aastha Jain Simes, put their heads together in this provocative and touching interview. Azra describes the technology of our new company PredictRX that detects cancer at Stage Negative One.

We do this with a “Stentinel,” (starts at 15 minutes in) a stent with electronic sensors that is implanted in the arm and sense Polyploid Giant Cancer Cells (PGCCs) within 18 days of appearing in a patient. Read more »

Announcing Science’s Third Great Transition

The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences

In 1960, physicist Eugene Wigner wrote what many consider one of the most profound scientific papers of the 20th century: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” He revealed how Mathematics haunts physics in a most uncanny way.

Wigner marveled at how perfectly mathematics describes physical reality. Newton’s laws, quantum electrodynamics, relativity – all use elegant mathematical formulas that predict physical behavior with extraordinary precision.

The fact that abstract math, developed in the minds of humans, so perfectly describes the physical universe is, as Wigner put it, “a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

Many times in physics, solutions dreamed up by mathematicians decades or centuries before suddenly show themselves to be precisely applicable.

Everyone in science accepts this, to the point where many define science itself as the imperative to reduce everything in the cosmos to equations.

But there’s twist to the story. Stuart Kauffman, Sy Garte and I just published a new paper in the journal Entropy. It’s called “The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences.” Read more »