Assembly Theory is Ontogenetic Depth relabeled, nothing more, and is just as useless

How exactly did this dreck, Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution, get published in Nature?

It’s a stunningly bad paper to be published in such a prestigious journal. Let’s dissect that abstract, shall we?

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution1,2 with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics.

This makes no sense. Evolutionary biologists have not had any problem with physical laws — it has always been assumed, as far as I know, that biology fits within the framework of chemistry and physics. What grappling? Have biologists been proposing theories that violate physics, and they didn’t tell me?

The citations to back up that outré claim are Stuart Kauffman, who can get a little weird but not that weird, and Ryan Gregory, whose papers I’ve used in class, and is probably a bit annoyed at being told his work supports that ridiculous claim.

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.

Sure. Emergent properties exist. We know you can’t simply derive all of biology from Ideal Gas Law. So far, nothing new.

Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection.

Uh-oh. Just selection? Tell me you know nothing of evolutionary biology without saying you don’t know anything about evolutionary biology.

To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary3,4,5.

Here it comes, more bad theorizing. It is implicit in evolution that there is no “inherent design blueprint,” so where did these authors get the idea that design was a reasonable alternative? They don’t say. This is simply another imaginary controversy they’ve invented to make their theory look more powerful.

We don’t need a new approach to selection. To support that, they cite Charles Darwin (???) and Sean B. Carroll, and a fellow named Steven Frank, whose work I’m unfamiliar with. A quick search shows that he applies “evolutionary principles to the biochemistry of microbial metabolism,” which doesn’t sound foreign to standard biology, although he does throw the word “design” around a lot.

But here we go:

We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units.

Again, what biological theory has ever been proposed that alters the laws of physics? They keep touting this as a key feature of their model, that it doesn’t break physics, but no credible theory does. This talk of formation histories is nothing revolutionary, history and contingency are already important concepts in biology. Are they really going to somehow quantify “assembly”? They’re going to try.

We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects. It explains how these objects can be characterized through a forward dynamical process considering their assembly.

I’ve heard this all before, somewhere. A new term invented, a claim of a novel measure of the complexity of a pathway, a shiny new parameter with no clue how to actually measure it? This is just ontogenetic depth! Paul Nelson should be proud that his bad idea has now been enshrined in the pages of Nature, under a new label. I did a quick check: Nelson is not cited in the paper. Sorry, Paul.

Here is all assembly theory is: You count the number of steps it takes to build an organic something, and presto, you’ve got a number A that tells you how difficult it was to evolve that something. That’s it. Biology is revolutionized and reconciled with physics. It’s just that stupid.

a–c, AT is generalizable to different classes of objects, illustrated here for three different general types. a, Assembly pathway to construct diethyl phthalate molecule considering molecular bonds as the building blocks. The figure shows the pathway starting with the irreducible constructs to create the molecule with assembly index 8. b, Assembly pathway of a peptide chain by considering building blocks as strings. Left, four amino acids as building blocks. Middle, the actual object and its representation as a string. Right, assembly pathway to construct the string. c, Generalized assembly pathway of an object comprising discrete components.

I told you, it’s just ontogenetic depth, with basic math. Here’s how to calculate A:

All you have to do is recursively sum the value of A for each object in the series, and you get the value of A for the whole! How you calculate the value of A for, say, acetate or guanine or oxaloacetic acid or your nose or a lobe of your liver is left as an exercise for the reader. It is also left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how A is going to affect their implementation of evolutionary biology.

By reimagining the concept of matter within assembly spaces, AT provides a powerful interface between physics and biology. It discloses a new aspect of physics emerging at the chemical scale, whereby history and causal contingency influence what exists.

I read the whole thing. I failed to see any new aspect of physics, or any utility to the theory at all. I don’t see any way to apply this framework to evolutionary biology, or what I’d do if I could calculate A for one of my spiders (fortunately, I don’t see any way to figure out the A of Steatoda triangulosa, so I’m spared the effort of even trying.)

The primary author, Leroy Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow, acknowledges that the work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Quelle surprise!

I honestly don’t understand how such a steaming pile managed to get past the editors and reviewers at Nature. It should have been laughed away as pure crank science and tossed out the window. There has to have been a lot of steps where peer review failed…maybe someone should try to calculate the assembly value for getting a paper published in Nature so we can figure out how it happened.

Sharma, A., Czégel, D., Lachmann, M. et al. Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9

Is Eric Hovind trying to provoke me?

He’s succeeding. He has this new series of videos titled “Beyond Darwin,” in which he tries to claim that fossils disprove evolution. It’s warmed-over Harun Yahya bullshit. You know, show a picture of a fossil, then show a picture of a modern animal, and declare, A-ha! There’s no difference between them!

It’s all perfectly ignorable nonsense, except he roused me from my slumber with this: SPIDERS DISPROVE EVOLUTION!

What a pitiful effort. Let’s scrutinize his example of failed evolution, shall we?

On the right, that’s a familiar beast: that’s a modern Araneus diadematus, or European garden spider, a big ol’ common orb weaver. It is most definitely a true spider.

On the left is a grainy photo of a fossil. It took me a moment to figure out what that is — you might look at it and notice that it seems to have only 6 legs. Actually, it has 8, but the 2nd pair is thin and attenuated. It also has a segmented abdomen, unlike most modern spiders, and there’s something going on with it’s mouthparts. It’s an arachnid all right, but it’s not a spider. That’s a fossil whip scorpion, Weygoldtina. Here’s a reconstruction that will clarify the details.

So here’s dumbass Hovind showing us a photo of two animals with radically different morphology, coming from two different distinct orders, the Araneae and the Amblypygi, and trying to tell us they look completely the same. Then he says Maybe evolution didn’t work on that one, or it just evolved as high as it can go, two excuses that aren’t valid evolutionary concepts. He riffs absurdly, pointing out that spiders still die, as if that’s something that wouldn’t happen under evolution.

Hey, Eric, does the fact that you’re still ignorant mean that education doesn’t exist? Do you think The Atlas of Creation is a biology textbook, rather than a religious scam written by a convicted con man? This approach didn’t work out so well for him, or your dad, you know.

I guess the rotting apple hasn’t fallen far from the dying corrupted tree, I guess.

Wait! I just watched the full video from Eric Hovind (the clip above is just an excerpt), and would you believe…he comes right out and cites The Atlas of Creation at the 21 minute mark and credits it for his ideas!

He is literally pulling out examples and photos from that discredited and blatantly silly book and quoting them as evidence that we have to move beyond Darwin. (Here’s a hint, Eric: we have. Darwin didn’t have genetics or molecular biology as tools.)

We can skip the accreditation process and go straight to the employers

Joining the esteemed ranks of the University of Austin and Prager U, Jordan Peterson will be accepting applications for his fake college, Peterson Academy, in November. It will be teaching a high level of conscientiousness, but not so much a real curriculum, and he announces that he doesn’t need any accreditation. Instead, he angrily announces that if employers have any sense, they’ll hire his graduates, and that he’ll be teaching skills that are valuable to any employer with a clue. Hire them or else, woke moralists!

He claims to have 30 reputable people lined up to teach courses (online, I presume?), but he won’t name any of them. He also says that it will only cost you $4000 to get a degree from Peterson Academy, although the value of that unaccredited piece of paper isn’t worth that much. It sounds exactly like a diploma mill grift, so I hope no one is seriously applying.

Dinosaur embryos…on the MOOOOOON!

I’m a guy who knows his way around an embryo, and is also knowledgeable about evolution, and to a lesser degree am interested in space exploration, so this article title is major league clickbait to me: Dinosaur eggs with fossilized embryos on the Moon. Awesome!

It’s a rather funky weird image, but I’m curious to know how they collected embryos from the Moon. Were these found in rocks brought back by Apollo or some other probe that scraped up some lunar dust, or pebbles, somehow? I had to read the methods section to find out. No, they aren’t looking at samples. They’re looking at Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) images.

Their published images all include latitude and longitude (that picture above is from Lat. 38.39144, Lon. 321.00588), so you can go directly to the LROC database and look at it for yourself. Here it is, straight from the source.

Huh. There’s a crater there with some clutter in it. Is that it? It’s hard to tell, especially since the authors defy convention and don’t include scale bars in their images. But then you have to realize that the LROC camera has a best resolution of 0.5m per pixel, look at the number of pixels in the “embryo,” and it’s suddenly clear: that “egg” is about 20km across. It’s a heavily processed and pseudocolored photo of a lunar crater!

This is justification to assign a scientific name to them, in their minds.

The two fossils of dinosaur embryos described here have not been reported anywhere so far and may belong to different genera and species than the known dinosaurs of the Earth. We tentatively name them as Lunasaurussaxenaii (Gen. novelsi, Spp. novelsi) [the author’s name is Saxena, so he’s naming it after himself] and Chandrasauruspolaris(Gen. novelsi, Spp. novelsi) (‘Chandra’ is a Sanskrit word, meaning the Moon), respectively for reference.

He also indulges in some raving speculation about how they got there.

The images presented here could be the first direct evidence of presence of higher form of life on the Moon during some stage of its evolution and example of extraterrestrial life answering the Fermi Paradox (Sandberg et al., 2018). Since dinosaurs became extinct at the Cretaceous – Tertiary boundary period coinciding with a massive asteroid impact on the Earth, it may be possible that a few dinosaur eggs and fossils and other animal fossils may have been ejected from the Earth along with rocks and debris due to the impact and could have reached the Moon due to the huge force of the collision and pulled towards the Moon due to the lunar gravity. However, in that case, the eggs would have not remained intact. Alternatively, there could have been life on the Moon in various forms during its evolutionary history and large animals may have persisted for some time on the Moon after its separation from the Earth but vanished later on due to unfavourable ecological and atmospheric conditions and hostile climate on the Moon

Nowhere does he address the observation that these things are many kilometers across.

He’s got a substantial collection of articles, all published in cheap-ass pay-to-play journals, with many interesting claims based entirely on mangling and misinterpreting NASA images. For example, he thinks he has found a Hindu temple on the Moon.

The present report is the first record of discovery of a mysterious object with Sri Yantra like shape near the Shackleton crater on the South Pole of the Moon suggests of earliest attempts of colonization of the Moon by Hindus.

He also claims to have disproven the theory of relativity, which is rather mundane crankery, and of course he has a mathematical proof for the existence of God, which he illustrates with this pretty scrawl:

I tried to extract some sense from the text, but couldn’t find any. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what the hell he is babbling about.

What happens on 4 October?

This is all rather vague, but this person has put it all together — 5G towers, chemtrails, smartphones, all the modern stuff, and a few myths — to predict our doom next week.

I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen, though. How are these devices supposed to suddenly kill us? A little more clarity would help.

She has fully embraced the power of the tinfoil hat, though. We’re supposed to wrap all our dangerous devices in aluminum foil and stash them in our cars, and park the cars 200 meters away (will they explode? I don’t know). Then wrap a room in multiple layers of aluminum foil and hide in there on 4-5 October, after which you can emerge into a world cleansed of technology, I guess, and…I don’t know.

How does she come to possess this secret and specific knowledge? The only possible way is if she is one of Them. If we survive next week, we’re going to have to travel the wasteland and hunt her down.

You just can’t hide in darkness anymore

I don’t know why, but it’s so satisfying to see a liar exposed. Lauren Boebert was thrown out of a theater for being loud, disruptive, and vaping. She denied it all, of course. But boy, surveillance video tech has gotten scary good, and she was caught on video doing all those things. Bonus: her boyfriend copping a feel and the two of them getting a bit handsy.

Next time I’m in a dark theater, I’m going to be conscious that someone might be watching everything. Not in Morris, though — we’re about 30 years behind the times on everything.

Avi Loeb found what he was looking for

You were expecting little green men?

Because of course he did, since he was going to happily declare anything he found to be of extrasolar origin. The preliminary analysis of the metal spheres he found at the bottom of the ocean has been published in ArXiv, as he announced on…the Michael Shermer podcast? I’m already prejudiced against believing him.

From a July expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a collection of small metallic spheres was recovered from the sea floor, which famous Harvard scientist Avi Loeb said Tuesday are from outside our solar system.

Tuesday’s press release, first reported by USA Today, suggests that 57 of the 700 metallic spheres, which were recovered by using a magnetic sled the team dragged through the water and sand, are interstellar in origin “based on the composition and isotopes.” That is unmatched by existing material in our solar system, Loeb said in an interview on “The Michael Shermer Show.”

“This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists have analyzed materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote in his Tuesday blog post on Medium.

The paper has also been posted on the X, formerly known as Twitter, shitshow.

Not peer-reviewed, obviously, and Shermer and X are the outlets used to display the results? Not impressive.

So what did he find? I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to interpret this result — maybe you are.

What he found is that the tiny little spheres he pulled up are enriched for beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, which is unusual compared to C1 chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites have an elemental composition reflective of the elements in the solar system as a whole, so this difference is taken as evidence that the meteor was from different star system altogether. Or, as was my first thought, that the meteor was not a carbonaceous chondrite. Or that the melting as it passed through the atmosphere altered the distribution of elements. Or that sitting in the ocean for a decade degraded the material in interesting ways. Or that his sampling technique was biased towards plucking out unusual samples. I don’t know, this is way outside my expertise, I just know I’m extremely suspicious of anything Avi Loeb says. I mean, he also declared that meteor was of interstellar origin based on a letter that used wobbly estimates of its speed and trajectory.

The interstellar origin of IM1 was established at the 99.999% confidence based on velocity measurements by US government satellites, as confirmed in a formal letter from the US Space Command to NASA.

I love the fact that he got 99.999% confidence from a third-hand letter based on largely confidential evidence. That tells me all I need to know.

But also, all the recent foofaraw about UFOs, like the recent congressional hearings, is rich old fools with no scientific background. They’re just certain that the aliens are here.

In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”

He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

If Loeb is famous now, it’s for quickly jumping on that cash cow and riding it hard. He found a UFO fanatic sugar daddy, and is milking him for everything he can.

From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.

It’s the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”

Exactly. Loeb is just the latest in a long line of ignoramuses and charlatans who claim to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, but when asked to show it reveal a thimble full of cherry-picked dirt. Unfortunately, it’s another symptom of the inequitable and unearned distribution of wealth, which allows absurdly wealthy people to throw barrels of cash undiscriminatingly at anyone willing to endorse their delusions. They keep sucking up unwarranted acknowledgements from prestigious institutions as well!

Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)

Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.

You know, universities — especially the large already rich ones — are often fueled by capitalistic grasping at money, right? And when idiots have lots of money, they aren’t shy about pandering to them.

By the way, Loeb made this announcement on the day his new book, Interstellar, was released. Very convenient.

So a few billion people die? It’s just a number

The lunatics in Silicon Valley are in a panic about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but they can’t really explain why. They are just certain that the results would be dire, and therefore justifies almost-as-dire responses to an existential threat. Just listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky…or better yet, don’t listen to him.

Consider a recent TIME magazine article by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a central figure within the TESCREAL movement who calls himself a “genius” and has built a cult-like following in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yudkowsky contends that we may be on the cusp of creating AGI, and that if we do this “under anything remotely like the current circumstances,” the “most likely result” will be “that literally everyone on Earth will die.” Since an all-out thermonuclear war probably won’t kill everyone on Earth—the science backs this up—he thus argues that countries should sign an international treaty that would sanction military strikes against countries that might be developing AGI, even at the risk of triggering a “full nuclear exchange.”

Well, first of all, it’s a sign of how far TIME magazine has declined that they’re giving space to a kook like Yudkowsky, who is most definitely not a genius (first clue: anyone who calls himself a genius isn’t one), and whose main claim to fame is that he’s the leader of the incestuous, babbling Less Wrong cult. But look at that “logic”!

Oh, but the alternative would be so much worse!

  • AGI will kill everyone (Evidence not shown)
  • All-out nuclear war will only kill almost everyone
  • Therefore, we should trigger nuclear war to prevent AGI

Yudkowsky then doubled-down on the stupidity.

Many people found these claims shocking. Three days after the article was published, someone asked Yudkowsky on social media: “How many people are allowed to die to prevent AGI?” His response was: “There should be enough survivors on Earth in close contact to form a viable reproductive population, with room to spare, and they should have a sustainable food supply. So long as that’s true, there’s still a chance of reaching the stars someday.”

That’s simply insane. He has decided that A) the primary goal of our existence is to build starships, B) AGI would prevent us from building starships, and C) the fiery extermination of billions of people and near-total poisoning of our environment is a small price to pay to let a small breeding population survive and go to space. I’m kinda wondering how he thinks we can abruptly kill the majority of people on Earth without triggering an extinction vortex. You know, this well-documented phenomenon:

Jesus. Someone needs to tell him that Dr Strangelove was neither a documentary nor a utopian fantasy.

But, you might say, that is so incredibly nuts that no one would take Yudkowsky seriously…well, except for TIME magazine. And also…

Astonishingly, after Yudkowsky published his article and made the comments above, TED invited him to give a talk. He also appeared on major podcast’s like Lex Fridman’s, and last month appeared on the “Hold These Truths Podcast” hosted by the Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw. The extremism that Yudkowsky represents is starting to circulate within the public and political arenas, and his prophecies about an imminent AGI apocalypse are gaining traction.

Keep in mind that this is the era of clickbait, when the key to lucrative popularity is to be extremely loud about passionate bullshit, to tap into the wallets and mind-space of paranoid delusionists. Yudkowsky is realizing that being MoreWrong pays a hell of a lot better than LessWrong.

Kooks hate being called on their kookery

Quack.

The College of Psychologists in Ontario has threatened to yank Jordan Peterson’s license if he wouldn’t take a course on professionalism in social media (it’s obvious that he needs it). Peterson challenged the decision in court.

The courts have spoken. He better take that course.

Last November, Peterson, a professor emeritus with the University of Toronto psychology’s department who is also an author and media commentator, was ordered by the College of Psychologists of Ontario to undergo a coaching program on professionalism in public statements.

That followed numerous complaints to the governing body of Ontario psychologists, of which Peterson is a member, regarding his online commentary directed at politicians, a plus-sized model, and transgender actor Elliot Page, among other issues. You can read more about those social media posts here.

The college’s complaints committee concluded his controversial public statements could amount to professional misconduct and ordered Peterson to pay for a media coaching program — noting failure to comply could mean the loss of his licence to practice psychology in the province.

Peterson filed for a judicial review, arguing his political commentary is not under the college’s purview.

The Ontario Divisional Court has dismissed Peterson’s application, ruling that the college’s decision falls within its mandate to regulate the profession in the public interest and does not affect his freedom of expression.

I’m trying to imagine myself in his position — it’s not that hard, although I don’t think I’ve been quite as maladroit and hateful on social media as Peterson. If I was threatened with loss of my position — I don’t have the external resources he does — and told I need to take a course in social media professionalism, I’d shrug and do it. Maybe I’d learn something. Peterson just hates to be told that he’s wrong about anything.

Peterson says he hasn’t undermined his profession at all.

He denies that he has brought disrepute to the profession, arguing the opposite is true.

I think I’ve done demonstrably more than any psychologist has ever produced to increase the prestige and trust of the practice of psychology around the world, Peterson said.

I can think of no one who has done more harm to the reputation of psychology than Jordan Peterson. He’s a narcissistic blabbermouth who invents, and teaches, garbage ideas.

The last place I’d want to be in October is Vegas

Look at this rogue’s gallery of idiots:

These are the speakers at a Flat Earth Conference, which is a thing I can scarcely believe exists in the 21st century.

But then, I thought about it, and realized that from the perspective of a casino owner, these are precisely the group of people I’d want staying at my gambling establishment. Roll out the red carpet! I’d give these people all kinds of special rates, knowing that I’d be able to extract plenty of profit from some of the most confidently innumerate people on the globe.

You know, I’ve been to Vegas a couple of times, and I’ve stayed in casinos a few times, because they generally have cheap room rates…but I’ve never in my life placed a bet at one. I’m probably the antithesis of their desired clientele, while the prospect of a bunch of flat-earthers has the venue owners drooling. Unfortunately for their bottom line, I don’t think many people will show up for this specific event.