Hector Zenil

Sara Walker’s Life as no one knows it arrives on the heels of extensive media coverage and promotional efforts that have catapulted it into bestseller status. I approached this book with a sense of anticipation, especially eager to explore her ideas on algorithmic probability and open-endedness–topics we briefly worked on together [1]. These areas of research are foundational to understanding life’s complexity and origins, and I had expected Walker’s book to delve into these subjects with depth and originality.

However, the book surprised me for other reasons–and unfortunately, not in a positive way. Rather than presenting her own work, much of the book focuses on the ideas of Leroy (Lee) Cronin, a chemist whose assembly theory (AT) has met with significant skepticism and criticism in the scientific community. The central thesis of AT is that the ability of life to make numerous copies of itself–or to utilize multiple copies of the resources it requires–is the defining feature of living systems. This concept, quantified through an “assembly index,” proposes that life’s complexity can be reduced to the mere counting of these copies. Note that it has been considered and disproven many times.

Cronin’s theory specifically has been disproven by multiple research groups [2,3,4], and the scientific merit of its approaches remains highly questionable. Walker, rather than scrutinizing or distancing herself from these ideas, devotes much of her book to promoting them without acknowledging the criticisms and counter-evidence.

Read the full article at: www.computingreviews.com

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