Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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and it's been downloaded over a few hundred thousand times. And someone actually wrote to me and said, this is an example of really bad writing and what not to do. And I was like, if all of my papers got read this much, because that's the objective, if I have a publishing paper and want people to read it, I want to write that badly again.
Yes. The most exciting criticism came from the evolutionary biologists telling me that they thought that origin of life was a solved problem. And I was like, whoa, we're really onto something, because it's clearly not. And when you poked them on that, they just said, no, you don't understand evolution.
And I said, no, no, I don't think you understand that evolution had to occur before biology, and there's a gap. That was really, for me, the... That misunderstanding, and that did cause an immune response, which was really interesting. The second thing was the fact that physicists, the physicists were actually really polite, right? Really nice about it.
But they just said, huh, we're not really sure about the initial conditions thing, but this is a really big debate that we should certainly get into because the emergence of life was not encoded in the initial conditions of the universe. And I think assembly theory shows why it can't be. I'll say that again.
The emergence of life was not and cannot, in principle, be encoded in the initial conditions of the universe. Just to clarify what you mean by life is like what, high assembly index objects? Yeah. And this goes back to your favorite subject. What's that?
I mean, probably we can come back to it later, but I think it might be if we have time. But I think I now understand how to explain how, you know, lots of people got angry with the assembly paper, but also the ramifications of this is how time is fundamental in the universe. and this notion of combinatorial spaces.
And there are so many layers on this, but I think you have to become an intuitionist mathematician, and you have to abandon platonic mathematics, and also platonic mathematics has left physics astray, but there's a lot to unpack there. So we can go to the... Platonic mathematics, okay.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they said lots of confusing statements. Basically, I realized the evolutionary biology community that were vocal, and some of them were really rude, really spiteful, and needlessly so, right? Because, look, you know, I didn't... People misunderstand publication as well. Some of the people have said, how dare this be published in Nature? This is, you know, what a terrible journal.
And it really, and I want to say to people, look, this is a brand new idea that's, not only potentially going to change the way we look at biology, it's going to change the way we look at the universe. And everyone's saying, how dare you? How dare you be so grandiose? I'm like, no, no, no, this is not hype.
We're not saying we've invented some, I don't know, we've discovered an alien in a closet somewhere just for hype. We genuinely mean this to genuinely have the impact or ask the question. And the way people jumped on that was a really bad precedent for young people who want to actually do something new because this makes a bold claim. And the chances are... It's not correct.
But what I wanted to do is a couple of things. I wanted to make a bold claim that was precise and testable and correctable. Not another woolly information in biology argument, information Turing machine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A concrete series of statements that can be falsified and explored and either the theory could be destroyed or built upon.
Yeah, that's really good. So... The assembly index of a molecule is not obvious. No one had measured it before. And no one has thought to quantify selection complexity and copy number before in such a primitive quantifiable way. I think the nice thing about this paper, this paper is is a tribute to all the people that understand that biology does something very interesting.
Some people call it negentropy. Some people think about organizational principles. Lots of people were not shocked by the paper because they'd done it before. A lot of the arguments we got, some people said, oh, it's rubbish. Oh, by the way, I had this idea 20 years before. I was like... Which one? Is it the rubbish part or the really revolutionary part?
So this kind of plucked two strings at once. There is something interesting that biology is, as we can see around this, but we haven't quantified yet. And what this is, the first stab at quantifying that. So the fact that people said, this is obvious, but it's also... So if it's obvious, why have you not done it?
Yeah, well, I think you will be able to. We just haven't got there robustly. So we can say, how can we... Let's go up a level. So if we go up from level, let's go up from molecules to cells because you jump to people and I jump to emoticons and both are good and they will be assembled.
Good point. If we go from... So if we go from molecules to assemblies, and let's take a cellular assembly, a nice thing about a cell is you can tell the difference between a eukaryote and a prokaryote, right? The organelles are specialized differently. We then look at the cell surface, right? and the cell surface has different glycosylation patterns, and these cells will stick together.
Now let's go up a level with multicellular creatures. You have cellular differentiation. Now, if you think about how embryos develop, you go all the way back, those cells undergo differentiation in a causal way that's biomechanically a feedback between the genetics and biomechanics. I think we can use assembly theory to apply to tissue types. We can even apply it to different cell disease types.
So that's what we're doing next. But we're trying to walk... You know, the thing is, I'm trying to leap ahead. I want to leap ahead to go, whoa, we apply it to culture. Clearly, you can apply it to memes and culture. And we've also applied assembly theory to CAs. And not as you think.
Yeah, yeah, cellular automata. Not just as you think. Different CA rules were invented by different people at different times. And one of my coworkers, very talented chap, basically was like, oh, I can realize that different people had different ideas with different rules. And they copied each other and made slightly different cellular automata rules and looked at them online.
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