Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask were building a pond that thinks. Their biological computing project set out to build ecosystems with inputs and outputs, that could function as computers. Beer also reported attempts to induce small organisms—Daphnia collected from a local pond—to ingest iron filings so that input and output couplings to them could be achieved via magnetic fields, and he made another attempt to use a population of the protozoan Euglena via optical couplings. Beer’s last at...
