Plus a stack of notes from me, explaining how Hazen's invigorating ideas are entirely compatible with cosmological natural selection: Darwinian evolution of universes supplies that "missing law"
Hi Julian, new reader here, I really enjoy your work on The Egg and the Rock. Robert's view is also fascinating (although I need to read the full article). I wonder if you ever stumbled upon the Lee Cronin and his assembly theory? I think it fits well in both your work and Robert and his team. Definitely worth reading, also kind of controversial idea :)
Hi Tom'ash, good question. (For readers unfamiliar with Lee Cronin: he's a distinguished chemist – Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow – who has famously raised HUGE amounts of funding for research into artificial life, digitisation of chemistry etc: he and some colleagues published a paper in Nature in October 2023 with the wonderfully confident title, "Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution", which caused a LOT of fuss. As Philip Ball said in an article in Chemistry World, "Evolutionary biologists in particular have expressed outrage — denouncing the paper as nonsense, and even a Trojan horse for creationism." Which is another beautiful example of mainstream scientists denouncing evidence of evolution because they are worried it will be seen as evidence for God.)
Yes, Tom'ash, Lee Cronin is another scientist doing something similar to Bob Hazen, albeit from a slightly different angle: he understands (as do Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, and the others on that team) that the hyper-complexification of our universe over time, and in particular the emergence of self-replicating life from purely geological chemistry, requires an explanation, as it is not obvious, from the laws of physics alone, why a ball of hot gas would end up looking like THIS. (Gestures broadly at his balcony, his laptop, some trees, cars, people, a dog, the biosphere, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and all the other galaxies.) Let me grab a quote that stuck with me, from the abstract to their paper...
"...the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena."
And I agree with them! It's weird, and would be highly unlikely in a random universe with arbitrary characteristics, and it does require an explanation.
So, Cronin et al sound very similar to Hazen et al. Obviously my current take on their idea (and this is a superficial take; I haven't yet read their paper as deeply as I have Hazen's) would be that I think they are describing something real that is downstream of the Darwinian evolution of universes, and better explained as the consequences of fine-tuning caused by the Darwinian evolution of universes. (So, similar to my take on Hazen's paper.)
But my opinion shouldn't be given much weight here, as I haven't dug as deeply as I should into assembly theory. Not because I don't want to! There's basically never enough time to read everything properly. Reading properly, taking notes, understanding a paper fully and teasing out the implications, takes a ridiculous amount of time. But this is on my list.
If any of you want to read Lee Cronin's assembly theory paper, it's here:
From my perspective, it's definitely worth exploring. Lee et al. were the first, I believe, to introduce the concept of the assembly index as a way to describe evolving systems. This index essentially measures the number of steps required to create an object starting from the simplest compounds. Naturally, other important factors like population size help eliminate one-time anomalies. The most controversial aspect of their work is their bold claim that anything with an assembly index above 15 is unequivocally a product of a living process. I'm not entirely convinced by this. Another issue is determining where to start the count. From a chemistry standpoint, atoms are considered natural, but what about elementary particles?
In my amateur opinion, Lee et al. are definitely onto something, but there's room for further analysis.
From the perspective of "The Egg" hypothesis, I'm curious if assembly theory could somehow demonstrate that our universe, with its specific physical properties, is not just a random occurrence but the result of an evolutionary process. This idea is even bolder than what Lee and his team proposed. The initial challenge is deciding where to start—perhaps at the level of quarks? Another issue is that the known population of universes is n=1, with no way to examine others. My second thought is to consider black holes. While their population is vast, many of their properties, such as singularities, remain a mystery.
What if, from a universal evolution perspective, we're just here to produce AIs that will then make lots of little black holes but not do anything we'd consider, say, beautiful? Seems like a worry for using this theory as a source of revitalized meaning.
Hi Julian, new reader here, I really enjoy your work on The Egg and the Rock. Robert's view is also fascinating (although I need to read the full article). I wonder if you ever stumbled upon the Lee Cronin and his assembly theory? I think it fits well in both your work and Robert and his team. Definitely worth reading, also kind of controversial idea :)
Hi Tom'ash, good question. (For readers unfamiliar with Lee Cronin: he's a distinguished chemist – Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow – who has famously raised HUGE amounts of funding for research into artificial life, digitisation of chemistry etc: he and some colleagues published a paper in Nature in October 2023 with the wonderfully confident title, "Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution", which caused a LOT of fuss. As Philip Ball said in an article in Chemistry World, "Evolutionary biologists in particular have expressed outrage — denouncing the paper as nonsense, and even a Trojan horse for creationism." Which is another beautiful example of mainstream scientists denouncing evidence of evolution because they are worried it will be seen as evidence for God.)
Yes, Tom'ash, Lee Cronin is another scientist doing something similar to Bob Hazen, albeit from a slightly different angle: he understands (as do Abhishek Sharma, Dániel Czégel, and the others on that team) that the hyper-complexification of our universe over time, and in particular the emergence of self-replicating life from purely geological chemistry, requires an explanation, as it is not obvious, from the laws of physics alone, why a ball of hot gas would end up looking like THIS. (Gestures broadly at his balcony, his laptop, some trees, cars, people, a dog, the biosphere, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and all the other galaxies.) Let me grab a quote that stuck with me, from the abstract to their paper...
"...the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena."
And I agree with them! It's weird, and would be highly unlikely in a random universe with arbitrary characteristics, and it does require an explanation.
So, Cronin et al sound very similar to Hazen et al. Obviously my current take on their idea (and this is a superficial take; I haven't yet read their paper as deeply as I have Hazen's) would be that I think they are describing something real that is downstream of the Darwinian evolution of universes, and better explained as the consequences of fine-tuning caused by the Darwinian evolution of universes. (So, similar to my take on Hazen's paper.)
But my opinion shouldn't be given much weight here, as I haven't dug as deeply as I should into assembly theory. Not because I don't want to! There's basically never enough time to read everything properly. Reading properly, taking notes, understanding a paper fully and teasing out the implications, takes a ridiculous amount of time. But this is on my list.
If any of you want to read Lee Cronin's assembly theory paper, it's here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
If you read it, please do share your thoughts. Should I bump it up to the top of my reading list?
From my perspective, it's definitely worth exploring. Lee et al. were the first, I believe, to introduce the concept of the assembly index as a way to describe evolving systems. This index essentially measures the number of steps required to create an object starting from the simplest compounds. Naturally, other important factors like population size help eliminate one-time anomalies. The most controversial aspect of their work is their bold claim that anything with an assembly index above 15 is unequivocally a product of a living process. I'm not entirely convinced by this. Another issue is determining where to start the count. From a chemistry standpoint, atoms are considered natural, but what about elementary particles?
In my amateur opinion, Lee et al. are definitely onto something, but there's room for further analysis.
From the perspective of "The Egg" hypothesis, I'm curious if assembly theory could somehow demonstrate that our universe, with its specific physical properties, is not just a random occurrence but the result of an evolutionary process. This idea is even bolder than what Lee and his team proposed. The initial challenge is deciding where to start—perhaps at the level of quarks? Another issue is that the known population of universes is n=1, with no way to examine others. My second thought is to consider black holes. While their population is vast, many of their properties, such as singularities, remain a mystery.
What if, from a universal evolution perspective, we're just here to produce AIs that will then make lots of little black holes but not do anything we'd consider, say, beautiful? Seems like a worry for using this theory as a source of revitalized meaning.