A 2025 paper in BioEssays by Michael Levin, titled 'The Multiscale Wisdom of the Body: Collective Intelligence as a Tractable Interface for Next-Generation Biomedicine,' proposes that collective intelligence operating across biological scales may offer a useful framework for medicine. That is what the title and publication record indicate. No abstract was available for this review, so no specific findings, arguments, or evidence from the paper itself can be reported.
Because no abstract or full text was accessible, it is impossible to assess the study design, the nature of the evidence presented, the claims made, or their limitations. The paper appears in BioEssays, a peer-reviewed venue, which means it passed editorial and reviewer scrutiny, but that fact alone says nothing about the strength or scope of its conclusions.
The topic connects to consciousness research because questions about whether cognition and awareness are properties of individual neurons or of distributed biological systems are live and contested. Levin has argued in other work that basal cognition may extend to non-neural tissues. Whether this paper advances, qualifies, or simply restates that position cannot be determined from available information.
Readers with access to the full text are better placed to evaluate the argument. Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39623868/ (DOI: 10.1002/bies.202400196).