a group of cells stores memory in their electrical impulses, which affects cell division.

We found a pretty amazing phenomenon, which is that if you make so-called “Picasso frogs” — these are tadpoles where the jaws might be off to the side, the eyes are up here, the nostrils are moved, so everything is shifted — these tadpoles make largely normal frog faces. Now, this is amazing, because all of the organs start off in abnormal positions, and yet they still end up making a pretty good frog face. And so what it turns out is that this system, like many living systems, is not a hardwired set of movements, but actually works to reduce the error between what’s going on now and what it knows is a correct frog face configuration. This kind of decision-making that involves flexible responses to new circumstances, in other contexts, we would call this intelligence. And so what we need to understand now is not only the mechanisms by which these cells execute their movements and gene expression and so on, but we really have to understand the information flow: How do these cells cooperate with each other to build something large and to stop building when that specific structure is created?

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