Beyond Biology: Professor's Journey Through Life's Mysteries

Michael Levin is a geneticist, a biology professor teaching at Tufts University and Harvard. He founded the "Levin Lab," which investigates the "collective intelligence of cells" and develops synthetic organisms through artificial intelligence, regenerative medicine, and defect correction. About a month ago, he published a bold article rejecting the materialistic perspective. For years, he engaged with the mechanistic language by which experts dissect the wonders of living human cells, but currently, he feels it's a betrayal of his own beliefs.

And no, he hasn't become religious. Levin doesn't claim expertise in religious matters, but when it comes to biology and genetics, he asserts that it's impossible to regard living cells as merely material products—this realization has emerged through his extensive career. He initiates his article by pointing out new biological evidence showing that organisms do not develop mechanistically from their DNA, as commonly believed. While DNA certainly contains vital information, organisms also possess intentions, as if they understand reality, adapting to unpredictable and evolving circumstances with decisions made on the fly.

Certain animals have regenerative abilities—they can heal themselves. If you sever a salamander's limb, it will regenerate a new one, regardless of where you cut. You can remove a part, and it can complete and recreate itself. Embryonic structure cells morph to align with reality. A cell can envelop itself in a special layer to form the desired structure! The entire developmental mechanism adapts to solve engineering challenges. Not only does genetics not dictate everything, but a developing organism can even bypass genetic issues. Flatworms can be manipulated to "grow" the head of a different worm species without altering their genetics because genetics isn't the whole story.

Levin writes: "This illustrates the living cell's ability to creatively employ genetic infrastructures to implement high-level anatomical specifications as needed. In other words, a starting cell entering the world cannot predict external environmental whims, and worse, even its own parts are unreliable. It cannot rely solely on genetic data; it must work with the available tools in new circumstances. What can it depend on?"

This demonstrates that there's something beyond the physical world. Matter doesn't act alone; there is some external, non-physical knowledge source that "assists" it. This concept was already present in Plato's writings but abandoned by modern science. As science progresses and examines life, it seems inevitable to return to this assumption—that mere material cannot solely explain life. Levin remarks that even in the last century, key physicists believed this, such as Werner Heisenberg, Roger Penrose, and others. In our times, biologists like Andreas Wagner from the University of Zurich and American Richard Sternberg have announced there's no point in persisting with materialism and self-explaining nature. There must be something beyond.

Furthermore, Levin argues that philosophically, as we define nature's laws in mathematical formulas, as customary in science, we're already departing from the natural realm. Since a mathematical formula is something abstract, it must precede the "formation" of physical reality or the law of nature. An abstract thing is spiritual. All the mathematical patterns and templates we use so successfully in physics demonstrate that physics is based on something beyond matter.

From this, Levin moves to a generalization: many complex life features do not naturally derive from their basic physical parts. Reality is not naturally explained. He writes: "A crucial aspect of biological patterns is that they are often not just the mechanical unfolding of a process. It's entirely possible to describe the parts through various mechanical aspects, but biological tools can achieve specific patterns despite new conditions, interventions, environmental changes, and their components, etc. In fact, these patterns serve as destinations for intelligent navigation (context-sensitive, creative, problem-solving) in another realm."

According to Levin, the remarkable complex structures in biology are not merely the inevitable result of natural selection. They are not even the inevitable outcomes of physics. Instead, they are founded on logical and mathematical realities describable only as non-physical: "All these are specific facts about a world that do not rely on physical facts—they can connect to other aspects of mathematics, but they form a set of findings not reducible to any physical facts at all."