Persistent non-genetic changes

Keep in mind a crucial point: in all these experiments, the genes of the worms are never edited. You get a wildly different functional worm with the same genes. And what's even wilder is that some of these changes are enduring: without any further drugs or modifications, the two-headed worm produces offspring that are also two-headed, indefinitely.
So on a practical level, the impact of Levin's work is a shift away from genes as the only determinant of structure, shifting instead towards the bioelectric network.

From A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder: 

 

The worm that is changed permanently reproduces by fission so it is somehow controllable, unlike sexually produced ones. But it's still strange. And it means that contingency not only selects but also literally produces different structure without any selection mechanism. This is pure Lamarckian.

The bigger, mind-blowing perspective shift in Levin’s work is to rethink what we think counts as an “agent”, with “goals” that it pursues. Is a cell an agent? An embryo? What about a liver? What about your immune system? Levin hypothesizes that way before evolution discovered agency and inte