To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.

Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction—and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

The same team that built the first living robots (” Xenobots,” assembled from frog cells—reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.

I continue to introduce you to a series of articles on the nature of human intelligence and the future of artificial intelligence systems. In the previous article “Artificial intelligence vs neurophysiology: Why the difference matters” we found out that the basis of the work of any biological nervous system is not a computational function (like in a computer), but a reflex or a prepared answer.

But how then did our intelligence come about? How did a biological system repeating pre-prepared reactions become a powerful creative machine?

In this article, we will answer this question in the language of facts. Creating our intelligence, nature has found a simple and at the same time ingenious solution, which is not devoid of a great mystery, which we will also touch.