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Every now and then, a new theory of aging sweeps through the longevity world. Some grand synthesis promising to explain everything. There was a time when insiders joked that theories of aging outnumbered the people studying it. The ratio is better today. The mystery remains. What aging is, in any final sense? We don’t know.

So give a round of applause to Michael Levin, whose new paper has split the crowd between revelation and déjà vu: either a turning point, or another beautiful detour.

Levin, who runs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, has built a career on studying the body’s electrical language - the quiet voltage patterns that guide how cells decide where they belong. His lab’s experiments are legendary: a tadpole with an eye grown on its tail that still connects to the brain; a flatworm that regenerates two heads after the original one was cut off. To Levin, biology is less a collection of chemical reactions and more a networked intelligence, a community of cells cooperating to build and maintain form. The new paper extends this idea to aging.

In the study, the researchers built tiny digital “organisms” - neural cellular automata, artificial cells that could communicate with their neighbors. These simulated tissues were trained to build a target pattern, a smiley face (yes, a smiley face), much like an embryo constructing a body. Once the pattern was complete, the system was left to run. Nothing new was added. No programmed death, no extra noise.

And yet the form began to drift. The smile faded, eyes blurred into the background. What had been orderly became disordered. Even a perfect, noiseless system decayed once it had completed its developmental mission.