Reading Thoughts and Notes
Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll
Difference before commonality? No commonality only difference and degrees of difference?
Life recurses because recursion is less words than iteration? Or because there is no iteration in biology, only while loops and conditionals? There are no scopes beyond the function that can keep a pointer i to track number of iterations, the universe doesn’t know how many times a gene has been transcribed
An egg is only an egg given some environment in which it was laid. A salmon egg on land does not grow a salmon and thus is not a salmon egg.
I worked in a kidney organoid lab a few summers ago where I got to grow kidneys in a dish from stem cells. It was pretty amazing. I took care of them for about a month (before we doused them in formaldehyde and other life ending chemicals that let us image them…). I also recently talked with a guy that runs a startup growing cerebral organoids on electrode arrays and is trying to use them as a radical form of computer chip. Scary, no? If that interest you, you can see that conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uXbBAU9rRI
Embryos must impose an orientation, polarities, maps and systems of logic in order to individuate, as Ahmed described
Differentiate, then repeat (through multiple organisms or within the same?) to define an organ (like Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition)
To stop cellular automata from using the boundaries of the grid as a stop signal, the environment in which it grows must contain gradients like the Hox proteins that stop Dll gene from growing more limbs at certain points
CA must develop axes and underlying gradients before developing more sophisticated patterns
Reminds me of this: visualization of layers of a neural network classifier – object detection also requires bands and stripe formation
When, how, and does a global clock form? “Clock-like precision” of somites? Or is it distributed cognition from which sense of time emerges? But then the underlying gradients within the embryo are the global clock governing the emergence, so how do they form a sense of time?
Does the embryo have a concept of money? A unifying trust in an abstraction of value, goods and labor at the cellular level?
We use additive AND subtractive manufacturing techniques, “the beauty of the limb is also sculpted by death… due to the death of the tissue in the developing limb.”
How can we make CA develop coordinate systems

Summary
In a scientific introduction to genetics and evolution, Carroll focuses on revealing common elements of modular design throughout life. Called homologs or homologous structures, the commonalities of branches of life in the past also reveals the evolution of differences. He points out that often evolution trends from a more general form towards more specialized forms.
Next, Carroll zooms in to the micro world of genes and e All info to make complex organism in the genes but reductionism of breaking into parts does not make the whole – put the embryo in the blender and it doesn’t work as well all of a sudden
First axes form, then somites / modular units at regular intervals along axes, then formation of various organs
Fated beings

Compelling Points
Life must develop maps and understandings of relative “where” and thus we see this recapitulated in streaks, bands, and lines that form where smooth gradients once were
We see life form individuation by approaching discretization in order to make sense of itself
This is Ahmed’s orientation incorporating. The cells demonstrate that before we can develop selves we develop a sense of where. We impose grids and relative maps on ourselves, and internally recreate the external within.
Biology uses subtractive manufacturing as well as additive, webbed feet
Death is a process that shapes the beginnings of life
Normal doesn’t exist without variation through which to map it
Developmental constraints as well as selection?

Implications
If there are 25,000 genes to build a human, there are 2^(25,000) combinations of way of testing their interactions, 2^(25,000) powersets of ways to combine genes. We cannot run that many experiments.

How necessary binaries are formed from continua and when and why and how we can do that effectively

Fate map is not a fate map without context and time in which it was mapped, much like our own maps??

Embryonics is inherently non-Markovian because the prior state feeds into the next state. Are Markov decision processes myths???

There is a border at which we are no longer useful to our children and genes but rather become a burden, and this is the point at which evolution allows us to accept death. But selfishness encoded in us muddies this.

The bacterial framework of reproduction defies our understanding of species (that which can reproduce with another organism is within the same species). But bacteria don’t require other organisms to reproduce, so our definition of species cannot apply.

Deleuze’s idea of the plane of immanence, upon which the egg rests, as well as Simondon’s preindividual, incorporate the potentials of possible futures to describe an unindividuated, unactualized being. Deleuze recognizes this as an imperative to being. Although I agree that