ArticleJournal of molecular evolution2024
Assembly Theory: What It Does and What It Does Not Do.
Article in Journal of molecular evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Selection for Function in Complex Distributed Pathological Systems.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Towards a Research Programme Aiming at Causes and Consequences of Reticulate Evolution.Biology · 2025Review
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Diet to Data: Validation of a Bias-Mitigating Nutritional Screener Using Assembly Theory.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- The (CMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Autocatalytic Sets and Assembly Theory: A Toy Model Perspective.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
A recent publication in Nature has generated much heated discussion about evolution, its tendency towards increasing diversity and complexity, and its potential status above and beyond the known laws of fundamental physics. The argument at the heart of this controversy concerns assembly theory, a method to detect and quantify the influence of higher-level emergent causal constraints in computational worlds made of basic objects and their combinations. In this short essay, I briefly review the theory, its basic principles and potential applications. I then go on to critically examine its authors' assertions, concluding that assembly theory has merit but is not nearly as novel or revolutionary as claimed. It certainly does not provide any new explanation of biological evolution or natural selection, or a new grounding of biology in physics. In this regard, the presentation of the paper is starkly distorted by hype, which may explain some of the outrage it created.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.