Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organisms (Clawson & Levin, 2022)

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• Biology's robustness, open-endedness, evolvability, and unique complexity likely depend on the fact that evolution works with an agential material.claim0.772
  Central claim linking life's properties to the inherent competencies of its material substrate.
• Bioengineering of Synthetic Life Formsconcept0.767
• nothing in biology makes sense except in light of teleonomyquote0.764
  Levin co-opts Dobzhansky's famous dictum to stress the primacy of goal-directedness.
• Artificial multicellular genetic chimeras can exhibit holistic behaviours and functions (Blackiston et al. 2021)finding0.759
  Experimental demonstration that chimeric organisms can act as integrated individuals despite genetic differences
• Progress in machine behavior science and biohybrid engineering breaks down the simplistic dualism of life vs. machine, revealing a continuum of emergence, rational control, and agency.claim0.757
  Second central claim: life and machine form a continuous multidimensional space, not discrete bins
• Synthetic morphology with agential materials (Davies & Levin, Nature Reviews Bioengineering 2023)concept0.755
  Paper on engineering with agential biological materials
• The creation of morphological novelty, biological invention, artistic creation, architectural invention ... may all be understood as products of a relatively simple process of intensifying existing latent centers.claim0.750
  Claim that the emergence of new forms, often considered mysterious, is explainable through repeated intensification of latent structure.
• Evolutionary transitions to new complex life forms mirror Alexander's levels of scale, each producing new nested centers with division of labor and interdependence.claim0.749