Lee Cronin: belief

Transcript context

…Well, what about the criticism of you’re just putting a bunch of sexy names on something that’s already obvious? Yeah, that’s really good. So the assembly index of a molecule is not obvious. No one had measure 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- … quantifiable way. I think the nice thing about this paper, this paper is a tribute to all the people that understand that biology does something very interesting. Some people call it negentropy. Some people call it, think about organizational principles that 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. It plucked the there is something interesting that biology are, we can see around this, but we haven’t quantified yet. And what this is, is the first stab at quantifying that, so the fact that people said “This is obvious.” But if it’s obvious, why have you not done it? Sure. But there’s a few things to say there. One is, this is in part of philosophical framework because it’s not like you can apply this generally to any object in the universe. It’s very chemistry focused.…

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