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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You want to make A and B in the shortest path, which might mean that A is slightly longer. You have a compromise. Right. So when you see slightly more nesting in the construction, when you take a given object, that can look longer, but that's because the overall function is the object is still trying to be efficient. And this is still very hand-wavy.
I maybe have no leg to stand on, but we think we're getting somewhere with that.
Yeah.
Yeah. And the thing we're working on right now is how to understand these parallel processes. Now there's a new thing we've introduced called assembly depth. And assembly depth can be lower than the assembly index for a molecule. when they're cooperating together because exactly this parallel processing is going on.
And my team have been working this out in the last few weeks because we're looking at what compromises does nature need to make when it's making molecules in a cell? And I wonder if, you know, I may be like, well, I'm always leaping out of my competence. But in economics, I'm just wondering if you could apply this in economic processes.
It seems like capitalism is very good at finding shortest path.
you know every time and there are ludicrous things that happen because actually the cost function has been minimized and so i keep seeing parallels everywhere where there are complex nested systems where if you give it enough time and you introduce a bit of heterogeneity the system readjusts and finds a new shortest path but the shortest path isn't fixed on just one molecule now it's in the actual
existence of the object over time and that object could be a city it could be a cell it could be a factory but i think we're going way beyond molecules and my competence probably should go back to molecules but hey all right before we get too far let's talk about the assembly equation okay how should we do this now let me just even read that part of the paper
And minus one, just to make sure that more than one object. One object could be a one-off and random. And then you have more than one identical object. That's interesting.
Two of a thing is super important, especially if the assembly index is high. So we could say several questions here.
So, yeah, so this is probably what, you know, the paper, we should talk about the paper for a second. The paper did, what it did is it kind of annoyed, um, we didn't know. I mean, it got attention and obviously angry people, the angry people were annoyed. There's angry people in the world. That's good. So what happened is the evolutionary biologists got angry.
We were not expecting that because we thought evolutionary biologists would be cool. I knew that some, not many, computational complexity people would get angry because I'd kind of been poking them and maybe I deserved it. But I was trying to poke them in a productive way. And then the physicists kind of got grumpy because the initial conditions tell everything.
The prebiotic chemist got slightly grumpy because there's not enough chemistry in there. And then finally, when the creationist said it wasn't creationist enough, I was like, I've done my job.
I think so.
Yeah. So what happened is the reason why people put the phone down on the core of their paper, if you view reading the paper like a phone call, they got to the abstract. Yep. And in the abstract... The first sentence is pretty strong.
True, right? There's nothing wrong with that statement. Totally true.
I am not... I would do it all again. This paper was actually on the preprint server for over a year.
Yeah, I think, yeah. I don't regret anything.
What I love about being a scientist is kind of sometimes... Because I'm a bit dim. I'm like... And I don't understand what people are telling me. I want to get to the point. This paper says, hey, laws of physics are really cool. The universe is great. But... they don't really, it's not intuitive that you just run the standard model and get life out.
I think most physicists might go, yeah, there's this, you know, it's not just, we can't just go back and say that's what happened because physics can't explain the origin of life yet. That doesn't mean it won't or can't. Okay. Just to be clear, sorry, intelligent designers, we are going to get there. Second point, we say that evolution works, but we don't know how evolution works.
Showing 61–80 of 545 · page 4 of 28
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