Quote of the Week
(September 15, 2025)

The way in which tissue voltage patterns prefigure the developing form of embryos has been central to the thinking of Michael Levin, a researcher at Tufts University. This prefiguring, he emphasizes, is not in the first instance a genetic event, but “a [much higher-level] physiological event ... causally responsible for a given patterning outcome” — and therefore also a cause of the gene expression required for that outcome.

In other words — and this is where Levin particularly sees himself offering something new — there is a kind of causation, somehow active in the larger pattern, that we cannot understand by adding together the causal action of molecular-level entities upon each other. The tissue-wide electric potentials can fairly be said to play a decisive role in stimulating cascades of gene expression on the way toward formation of entire organs. But, in the reverse direction, genes cannot be said to cause, or explain, the patterns of electric potential.

(from Chapter 10, “What Is the Problem of Form?”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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