Michael Levin keeps publishing ideas everyone attacks him for. His revised "Platonic Space" paper revisits decades of unpopular claims about embryogenesis, bioelectricity, and intelligence. He gets nasty emails and his work damages unrelated papers, but Robert Ta argues Levin stays data-driven where others quit.
This is from Packy McCormick. The race for the most important results in science is a 2-horse race between LLMs backed by trillions of dollars, armies of geniuses, and the full weight of capitalism. And on the other side, Michael Levin. My money is on Michael Levin. And this is in response to Michael Levin's tweet. Here it is. The official revised peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. Of all the many unpopular positions I've taken over the decades, bitter controversies, Around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc. This one has by far generated the most pushback. Serious— grateful for those— and energetic attempts to move me to other views. Please to just drop it and not talk about it for just several different reasons. Nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say? Our job is to call it as we see it. And right now, for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel. Time will tell if this pans out or not. I've placed my bets. And by the way, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait. There's much more on the way. The knob turns slowly, but as long as the data keeps coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up. I love this guy because he's just trying to find truth and put it out there. And you gotta commend that, like, as a human for all of humanity, you know, you gotta commend that.
