Georgina Woodward
A 3 hour 19 minute video? But the actual open access Nature paper is online (1), and is only 12 pages long!
Contrary to the paper’s title, Assembly Theory is seemingly nothing more than an attempt to quantify life; it doesn’t actually “[explain] … selection and evolution”(1) at all . According to associate professor Bill Bateman, a behavioural ecologist at Curtin University (2):
“The “object” in assembly theory is then what “laws of physics” act on. For any object, we can calculate its “assembly index”, a number that measures how complex the object would be to make. Any object that is both abundant and has a high assembly index is unlikely to have arisen by chance, so it must be a product of evolution and selection. This, in itself, is neither problematic nor new – apart from this calculated “index”. How do we figure out that assembly index? We count the number of steps it would take to build a molecule, say, or a bodily organ, or a whole organism. The higher the index, the more likely it is to have evolved. So assembly theory is an attempt to quantify the complexity of something and the likelihood of it having evolved.”
The whole Nature article seems to be a textbook example of how to use diagrams and lots of words to describe unnecessary outcomes, as opposed to using the equations of physics to describe necessary outcomes. The authors have no explanation for the actual selection of actual outcomes, which they describe as “an unknown physical process”:
“This suggests that selectivity in an unknown physical process can be explained by experimentally detecting the number of objects, their assembly index and copy number as a function of time.”
- “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution”, 4 October 2023. By Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, Michael Lachmann, Christopher P. Kempes, Sara I. Walker & Leroy Cronin, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 .
- “A new theory linking evolution and physics has scientists baffled – but is it solving a problem that doesn’t exist?”, 10 November 2023. By Bill Bateman, https://theconversation.com/a-new-theory-linking-evolution-and-physics-has-scientists-baffled-but-is-it-solving-a-problem-that-doesnt-exist-216639 .