To this day, in order to coalesce into a body, each cell in an organism must know who it is and what it does. Cells understand themselves by way of other cells; in a chain of three cells, for example, the third cell knows it is third—and thus endowed with a special task reserved for third cells—because of its awareness of the presence of cell one and cell two. That is the nature of a self-organizing system, a cohesive body. But how that cell knows it is third remains a mystery. We know that information must be passed to it by its collaborator cells. This communication, whatever it is, begins
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