“Behavior is the result of a complex ill-understood set of computations performed by nervous systems and it seems essential to decompose the question into two,” he wrote, “one concerned with the question of the genetic specification of nervous systems and the other with the way nervous systems work to produce behaviour.” In other words, how do genes build brains and how do brains direct bodies?”

“They had a map of the brain, a model of the body, and a pretty good idea of how to build the environment. Their artificial intelligence might not be embodied, but it would be “situated.” The brain would direct the body and the body would interact with the environment, and all three pieces would be connected by the intricate feedback loops that permeate biology. Their goal became clear: they should build, as they put it on the website, “a fully digital lifeform — a virtual nematode — in a completely open source manner.”

“Thinking about it that way makes me go beyond a black and white notion of ‘alive’ to a more functional perspective — living systems are those which self sustain. Our goal is to aggregate more of the biological processes we know that help the worm to self-sustain than have ever been aggregated before, and to measure how close our predictions of behavior match real living behavior, more than it is to shoot for some pre-conceived notion of how much ‘aliveness’ we need.”

“More broadly, OpenWorm raises fascinating questions about what we mean when we say something is alive. If and when this project succeeds in modeling the worm successfully, we’ll be faced with a new and fascinating concept to think with: a virtual organism. Imagine downloading the worm and running it in a virtual petri dish on your computer. What, exactly, will you be looking at? Will you consider it to be alive? What would convince you?”

“OpenWorm isn’t like these other initiatives; it’s a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that’s coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.”

“An Unending Quest to “Know thyself”:


At the start of the twenty-first century, we lack the specific spiritual resources and cultural contexts that made feasible the characteristic nineteenth-century quests of Emerson and Nietzsche—never mind the early modern lives of Montaigne and Descartes, or such ancient exemplars as Socrates, Plato, Seneca, and Augustine.

For whether we acknowledge it or not, we still live in the shadow of the Delphic injunction “Know thyself” and the Socratic ambition to examine oneself and others, even if taking these ideals seriously in the wake of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Nietzsche seems now to entail an unending quest, with no firm goal and no certain reward, apart from experiencing, however briefly, a yearning for wisdom and a desire to live a life in harmony with that yearning—come what may.”