Wrapping things up for Assembly Theory

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Three new papers described in this Phys.org article, would seem to put an end to Assembly Theory and the Assembly Index.

Links to referenced articles:

  1. Uthamacumaran et al (2024), On the salient limitations of the methods of assembly theory and their classification of molecular biosignatures

  2. Abrahão et al (2024), Assembly Theory is an approximation to algorithmic complexity based on LZ compression that does not explain selection or evolution

  3. Ozelim et al (2024), Assembly Theory Reduced to Shannon Entropy and Rendered Redundant by Naive Statistical Algorithms

Assembly Theory was perhaps “too good to be true” from the outset. The grand claims for what it could accomplish didn’t help either. The problem from my own point of view is that statistical inference based on data compression simply doesn’t work very well.
I haven’t read these papers yet, but what I gather from this overview is that standard methods based on Shannon Entropy and the entropy of compressed information already do what the Assembly Index is claimed to do.

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Well I am glad to learn of that. All of this is above my pay grade, but to me that Assembly Theory paper really seemed like a pile of … I had better not say.

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Well the grand claims made about Assembly Theory were a steaming pile of betternotsaid, but the nitty-gritty of how it works is kind of interesting. As it turns out, interesting enough that someone else thought of it first.

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