The molecular mechanisms behind cell cognition
By 
Philip Ball2025-10-13T12:30:00
Condensate formation is central to how budding yeast cells decide their response to environmental and internal conditions
Life, according to biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University in Massachusetts and the late philosopher Daniel Dennett, is ‘cognition all the way down’. ‘We reject a simplistic essentialism where humans have “real” goals, and everything else has only metaphorical “as if” goals’, they wrote in 2020. ‘Recent advances in basal cognition and related sciences are showing us how to move past this kind of all-or-nothing thinking about the human animal’ and recognising ‘a continuum of how much agency any system has’.