Bookmarks 2025-06-10T18:16:30.162Z
by Owen Kibel
32 min read
56 New Bookmarks
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LIVE: President Donald Trump speaks at the White House - YouTube Jun 10, 2025 LIVE: President Donald Trump speaks at the White House YouTube Watch President Donald Trump speak at the White House.---------------------------------------------------------------------STAY CONNECTED AND STAY AHEAD WITH... |
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Jun 10, 2025
Trump Says ARREST Gavin Newsom Over LA Riots In HILARIOUS Clip
YouTube
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Sign Up For Exclusive Episodes At https://timcast.com/Merch - https://timcast.creator-spring... |
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Jun 10, 2025
"That's Sacrilege": Megyn Kelly Reacts to the Images of Flags on Display at Anti-ICE Riots in LA
YouTube
"That's sacrilege": Megyn Kelly reacts to the images of flags on display at anti-ICE riots in LA. LIKE & SUBSCRIBE for new videos everyday: https://bit.ly/3A... |
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Jun 10, 2025
Simone Biles Destroys Reputation Over Stance On Boys in Girls Sports, w/Miranda Devine
YouTube
Megyn Kelly is joined by Miranda Devine, "New York Post" columnist and host of "Pod Force One," to discuss the latest drama in the feud between Simone Biles ... |
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Jun 10, 2025
Your cat doesnât think youâre its owner.
YouTube |
| | Crashed lander looks back at Earth from the moon photo of the day for June 10, 2025 | Space
Jun 10, 2025
Crashed lander looks back at Earth from the moon | Space photo of the day for June 10, 2025
Space
The private company's lunar lander could almost see Japan, if it weren't for the clouds. |
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Jun 10, 2025
Rioters Are ACTUALLY Just "People Having Fun Watching Cars Burn"
YouTube
Become A Memberhttp://youtube.com/timcastnews/joinThe Green Room - https://rumble.com/playlists/aa56qw_g-j0BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO FIGHT BACK - https://castb... |
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Jun 10, 2025
Mike Johnson says Gavin Newsom should be "tarred and feathered" over L.A. protests
Axios
On whether Newsom should be arrested, the GOP speaker said, "That's not my lane." |
| | Joel Fischer đșđž on X: "Gavin Newscum should resign in disgrace. https://t.co/umvJfBftks" / X
Jun 10, 2025 |
| | Sarah For Trumpđœđșđžđźđ± on X: "Four flags of countries where the people are super pro-Israel. You tell me the fifth one! https://t.co/yOSMXzidXI" / X
Jun 10, 2025 |
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Jun 10, 2025
Trump Deploys MARINES To LA Riots, Mexican President Says STAND With Illegals | Timcast IRL
YouTube
Text TIM to 36912 to get 60% off the BAERSkin Hoodie today!BAERSKIN - https://baerskintactical.com/lp/baerskin-hoodie-4/?dodo=ACZGxfIGC0sFqBjQU6HQpSUPPORT TH... |
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Jun 10, 2025
Mexican President SLAMS Trump, Calls For People To STAND AGAINST TRUMP
YouTube
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Sign Up For Exclusive Episodes At https://timcast.com/Merch - https://timcast.creator-spring... |
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Jun 10, 2025
MASS LOOTING In LA Riots, Marines DEPLOY, Rioters SACK Apple Store In INSANE VIDEO, Trump Is RIGHT
YouTube
Things are getting absolutely insane in the LA Riots, troops are sent inBecome A Memberhttp://youtube.com/timcastnews/joinIn response to escalating unrest an... |
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Jun 10, 2025
CNN SHOCKED, Even Amid LA Riots Trump Approval On Immigration SKYROCKETS, Democrats LIE About Polls
YouTube
If Democrats didnt lie theyd say nothing at allBecome A Memberhttp://youtube.com/timcastnews/joinCNN has reported a substantial rise in President Trumpâs app... |
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| Katz: Thunberg and the other detained flotilla activists refused to watch film of Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7 | The Times of Israel
Jun 10, 2025
Katz: Thunberg and the other detained flotilla activists refused to watch film of Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7
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| | Tim Pool on X: "It's his fetish" / X
Jun 10, 2025 |
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Jun 10, 2025
A "Peaceful Protest" That Looks More Like An INSURRECTION
YouTube
Become A Memberhttp://youtube.com/timcastnews/joinThe Green Room - https://rumble.com/playlists/aa56qw_g-j0BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO FIGHT BACK - https://castb... |
| | Sir Templemount on X: "@BillAckman https://t.co/vBFApvqTNg" / X
Jun 10, 2025 |
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Jun 10, 2025
Animals canât talk like humans do â hereâs why the hunt for their languages has left us empty-handed
The Conversation
Many scientists see evidence of language in the sounds animals put together, but they may be kidding themselves. |
| | The Other Nasty Breakup Inside MAGA - WSJ
Jun 10, 2025 |
| | Bill Ackman on X: "Well said." / X
Jun 10, 2025 |
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| First-Ever Sauropod Stomach Contents, Dating Back 100 Million Years, Reveal They Didnât Chew Their Food | IFLScience
Jun 9, 2025
Weâve Found Sauropod Stomach Contents For The First Time, Revealing They Had Terrible Manners
IFLScience
Thanks to their "gastric furnace", these prehistoric giants harnessed the power of fermentation. |
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| Muskâs administration allies become targets | Semafor
Jun 9, 2025
Muskâs administration allies become targets
Among the figures caught in a still-simmering clash between the MAGA right and tech right is AI and crypto czar David Sacks. |
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Jun 9, 2025
Scoop: Trump held lengthy Camp David strategy session with top team on Iran and Gaza
Axios
Virtually Trump's entire top team took part. |
| | Elon Musk on X: "Most entertaining outcome is most likely" / X
Jun 9, 2025 |
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Jun 9, 2025
Adam Carolla Reacts to Insane Footage from the LA Immigration Riots
YouTube
Adam Carolla is on tour! For dates, tickets and more go to http://adamcarolla.com!Independent journalist Aldo Buttazzoni calls into the show to discuss the h... |
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Jun 9, 2025
David Mamet | Club Random
YouTube
David Mamet and Bill Maher cover a lot of ground this spirted conversation, discussing Mametâs recent film Henry Johnson, his upcoming projects including a n... |
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Jun 9, 2025
The Values of Our Youth: VDH Interviews Julie Banderas
YouTube
In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson interviews Julie Banderas about her new book "A Monumental Mistake" which gives advice to youth both on personal conduct... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Victor Davis Hanson Interviews David Mamet
YouTube
Join Victor Davis Hanson in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, author, and filmmaker David Mamet. Topics discussed include David's new book... |
| | David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense on X: "Michael Antonâs Celebration Parallax, as explained by @TuckerCarlson https://t.co/n7RC5pJyw0" / X
Jun 9, 2025 |
| | Maverick Philosopher: Michael Anton on "Celebration Parallax"
Jun 9, 2025
Michael Anton on "Celebration Parallax"
Maverick Philosopher
Here: More tellingly, this charge is an example of something I call the âcelebration parallax,â which is explained here. In brief, the celebration parallax holds that the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending... |
| | Michael Anton - Wikipedia
Jun 9, 2025
Michael Anton - Wikipedia |
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Jun 9, 2025
âYou WONâT Silence Me!â Gaza War + Greta Thunberg âStuntâ | Piers Morgan Debate
YouTube
Greta Thunbergâs boat has been intercepted by Israeli forces en route to the strip, with the Swedish activist posting a video to her social media followers s... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Dems Call Anti-ICE Riots âPeaceful,â and ABC Suspends Journalist for Trump Tweet, with Charlie Kirk
YouTube
Megyn Kelly begins the show by breaking down the violent anti-ICE protests that erupted in Los Angeles over the weekend, the rioters' blatant disregard for h... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Victor Davis Hanson: Gavin Newsomâs âRecklessâ Surrender of LA to Foreign National Riots
YouTube
This episode is sponsored by the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. Learn more: https://go.pepperdine.edu/dailysignalLos Angeles erupted in riots over ICE d... |
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Jun 9, 2025
WHILE LOS ANGELES BURNS, LEFTISTS CALL IT PEACEFULâTRUMP WILL BRING LAW & ORDER
YouTube
While Los Angeles burnsâofficers ambushed, city in chaosâKamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Maxine Waters call the riots and insurrection âpeaceful.â These lef... |
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Jun 9, 2025
AI Music So Real, It's Scary - Listen to What Mureka AI Made
YouTube
#mureka #aimusic #ai This AI music generator can create music similar to your favorite songs as a reference. It's called Mureka AI. Try it here: https://bit.... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Can You Really Choose the Perfect Baby? What Genetic Screening Misses | National Review |
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Jun 9, 2025
Miranda Devine: Foreign flags fly in LA anti-ICE riots â vindicating Donald Trump and leaving Dems with no moral standing
New York Post
The minute the foreign flags came out in the violent anti-ICE protests in LA over the weekend, thatâs when Donald Trump won the moral high ground. |
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Jun 9, 2025
Miranda Devine: Migrant crime defined Bidenâs legacy â and Trump is tasked with cleaning up the mess
New York Post
The disasters of Joe Bidenâs open border policy are coming home to roost. |
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Jun 9, 2025
Miranda Devine: Jill Bidenâs âwork husbandâ Anthony Bernal may have played a key role in covering up Joeâs cognitive decline
New York Post
There are few doubts in the White House about Jill âLady Macbethâ Bidenâs role in covering up her husbandâs cognitive deficits as she urged him to run for re-election. |
| | A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe | WIRED
Jun 9, 2025
A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe
WIRED
A novel suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.
In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they? Many answers to Fermiâs âparadoxâ have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations donât appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception. A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamicsâthe law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If theyâre right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matterâliving organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function. This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not âcompleteâ in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolutionâbiological or otherwiseâintroduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. âIâm so glad theyâve done what theyâve done,â said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. âTheyâve made these questions legitimate.â Others argue that extending evolutionary ideas about function to non-living systems is an overreach. The quantitative value that measures information in this new approach is not only relativeâit changes depending on contextâitâs impossible to calculate. For this and other reasons, critics have charged that the new theory cannot be tested, and therefore is of little use. The work taps into an expanding debate about how biological evolution fits within the normal framework of science. The theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection helps us to understand how living things have changed in the past. But unlike most scientific theories, it canât predict much about what is to come. Might embedding it within a meta-law of increasing complexity let us glimpse what the future holds? Making Meaning The story begins in 2003, when the biologist Jack Szostak published a short article in Nature proposing the concept of functional information. Szostakâwho six years later would get a Nobel Prize for unrelated workâwanted to quantify the amount of information or complexity that biological molecules like proteins or DNA strands embody. Classical information theory, developed by the telecommunications researcher Claude Shannon in the 1940s and later elaborated by the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, offers one answer. Per Kolmogorov, the complexity of a string of symbols (such as binary 1s and 0s) depends on how concisely one can specify that sequence uniquely. For example, consider DNA, which is a chain of four different building blocks called nucleotides. Î strand composed only of one nucleotide, repeating again and again, has much less complexityâand, by extension, encodes less informationâthan one composed of all four nucleotides in which the sequence seems random (as is more typical in the genome). But Szostak pointed out that Kolmogorovâs measure of complexity neglects an issue crucial to biology: how biological molecules function. In biology, sometimes many different molecules can do the same job. Consider RNA molecules, some of which have biochemical functions that can easily be defined and measured. (Like DNA, RNA is made up of sequences of nucleotides.) In particular, short strands of RNA called aptamers securely bind to other molecules. Letâs say you want to find an RNA aptamer that binds to a particular target molecule. Can lots of aptamers do it, or just one? If only a single aptamer can do the job, then itâs unique, just as a long, seemingly random sequence of letters is unique. Szostak said that this aptamer would have a lot of what he called âfunctional information.â If many different aptamers can perform the same task, the functional information is much smaller. So we can calculate the functional information of a molecule by asking how many other molecules of the same size can do the same task just as well. Szostak went on to show that in a case like this, functional information can be measured experimentally. He made a bunch of RNA aptamers and used chemical methods to identify and isolate the ones that would bind to a chosen target molecule. He then mutated the winners a little to seek even better binders and repeated the process. The better an aptamer gets at binding, the less likely it is that another RNA molecule chosen at random will do just as well: The functional information of the winners in each round should rise. Szostak found that the functional information of the best-performing aptamers got ever closer to the maximum value predicted theoretically. Selected for Function Hazen came across Szostakâs idea while thinking about the origin of lifeâan issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. âI concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,â Hazen said. âI felt there had to be some kind of continuumâthere has to be something thatâs driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.â Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the âincreasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.â In 2007 Hazen collaborated with Szostak to write a computer simulation involving algorithms that evolve via mutations. Their function, in this case, was not to bind to a target molecule, but to carry out computations. Again they found that the functional information increased spontaneously over time as the system evolved. There the idea languished for years. Hazen could not see how to take it any further until Wong accepted a fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in 2021. Wong had a background in planetary atmospheres, but he and Hazen discovered they were thinking about the same questions. âFrom the very first moment that we sat down and talked about ideas, it was unbelievable,â Hazen said. âI had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,â Wong said. âI thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that weâd be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that weâd be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?â The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. âWe needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each otherâs prejudices,â Hazen said. âThis is not a mineralogical problem; itâs not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. Itâs all of those things.â They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. âWe all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,â Hazen said. âBut it seems like thereâs a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think itâs because of selection for functionâa very orderly process that leads to ordered states. Thatâs not part of the second law, although itâs not inconsistent with it either.â Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that donât seem related to life at all. At first glance, it doesnât seem a promising idea. In biology, function makes sense. But what does âfunctionâ mean for a rock? All it really implies, Hazen said, is that some selective process favors one entity over lots of other potential combinations. A huge number of different minerals can form from silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium, and so on. But only a few are found in any given environment. The most stable minerals turn out to be the most common. But sometimes less stable minerals persist because there isnât enough energy available to convert them to more stable phases. This might seem trivial, like saying that some objects exist while other ones donât, even if they could in theory. But Hazen and Wong have shown that, even for minerals, functional information has increased over the course of Earthâs history. Minerals evolve toward greater complexity (though not in the Darwinian sense). Hazen and colleagues speculate that complex forms of carbon such as graphene might form in the hydrocarbon-rich environment of Saturnâs moon Titanâanother example of an increase in functional information that doesnât involve life. Itâs the same with chemical elements. The first moments after the Big Bang were filled with undifferentiated energy. As things cooled, quarks formed and then condensed into protons and neutrons. These gathered into the nuclei of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms. Only once stars formed and nuclear fusion happened within them did more complex elements like carbon and oxygen form. And only when some stars had exhausted their fusion fuel did their collapse and explosion in supernovas create heavier elements such as heavy metals. Steadily, the elements increased in nuclear complexity. Wong said their work implies three main conclusions. First, biology is just one example of evolution. âThere is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.â Second, he said, there might be âan arrow in time that describes this increasing complexity,â similar to the way the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the increase in entropy, is thought to create a preferred direction of time. Finally, Wong said, âinformation itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.â In the work Hazen and Szostak conducted on evolution using artificial-life algorithms, the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps. That echoes what is seen in biological evolution. Biologists have long recognized transitions where the complexity of organisms increases abruptly. One such transition was the appearance of organisms with cellular nuclei (around 1.8 billion to 2.7 billion years ago). Then there was the transition to multicellular organisms (around 2 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the abrupt diversification of body forms in the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago), and the appearance of central nervous systems (around 600 million to 520 million years ago). The arrival of humans was arguably another major and rapid evolutionary transition. Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable. In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the ânext floor up.â Crucially, what mattersâthe criteria for selection, on which continued evolution dependsâalso changes, plotting a wholly novel course. On the next floor up, possibilities await that could not have been guessed before you reached it. For example, during the origin of life it might initially have mattered that proto-biological molecules would persist for a long timeâthat theyâd be stable. But once such molecules became organized into groups that could catalyze one anotherâs formationâwhat Kauffman has called autocatalytic cyclesâthe molecules themselves could be short-lived, so long as the cycles persisted. Now it was dynamical, not thermodynamic, stability that mattered. Ricard SolĂ© of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view thereâs a kind of physics of evolutionâand itâs a kind of physics we know about already. The Biosphere Creates Its Own Possibilities The tricky thing about functional information is that, unlike a measure such as size or mass, it is contextual: It depends on what we want the object to do, and what environment it is in. For instance, the functional information for an RNA aptamer binding to a particular molecule will generally be quite different from the information for binding to a different molecule. Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of whatâs available. Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emergedâthis required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations. However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution canât be predictedâand yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. âThe biosphere is creating its own possibilities,â Kauffman said. âNot only do we not know what will happen, we donât even know what can happen.â Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, âWe need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.â The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution âgenerates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.â Mathematically, a âphase spaceâ is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether itâs as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the âincompleteness theoremsâ devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that canât be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms. Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödelâs theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isnât the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential. âAn increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,â said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, âgoes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.â Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mixâonce the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments âin their headsââthe potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. âTechnological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,â he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind. Back to the Bench If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional informationâin effect, complexityâdoes this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is âutterly improbable.â After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life? Mayrâs evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot. But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new âlaw of increasing functional informationâ is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesnât have to rely on some highly improbable chance event. Whatâs more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileoâs (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds. Together with the chemist Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, Sara Walker of Arizona State University has devised an alternative set of ideas to describe how complexity arises, called assembly theory. In place of functional information, assembly theory relies on a number called the assembly index, which measures the minimum number of steps required to make an object from its constituent ingredients. âLaws for living systems must be somewhat different than what we have in physics now,â Walker said, âbut that does not mean that there are no laws.â But she doubts that the putative law of functional information can be rigorously tested in the lab. âI am not sure how one could say [the theory] is right or wrong, since there is no way to test it objectively,â she said. âWhat would the experiment look for? How would it be controlled? I would love to see an example, but I remain skeptical until some metrology is done in this area.â Hazen acknowledges that, for most physical objects, it is impossible to calculate functional information even in principle. Even for a single living cell, he admits, thereâs no way of quantifying it. But he argues that this is not a sticking point, because we can still understand it conceptually and get an approximate quantitative sense of it. Similarly, we canât calculate the exact dynamics of the asteroid belt because the gravitational problem is too complicatedâbut we can still describe it approximately enough to navigate spacecraft through it. Wong sees a potential application of their ideas in astrobiology. One of the curious aspects of living organisms on Earth is that they tend to make a far smaller subset of organic molecules than they could make given the basic ingredients. Thatâs because natural selection has picked out some favored compounds. Thereâs much more glucose in living cells, for example, than youâd expect if molecules were simply being made either randomly or according to their thermodynamic stability. So one potential signature of lifelike entities on other worlds might be similar signs of selection outside what chemical thermodynamics or kinetics alone would generate. (Assembly theory similarly predicts complexity-based biosignatures.) There might be other ways of putting the ideas to the test. Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational âartificial life.â Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist FrĂ©dĂ©ric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues. Hazenâs team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. âPeople are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,â Hazen said. But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. Itâs hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe.|Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
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| Ryan Whitwam (@rwhitwam.bsky.social) â Bluesky
Jun 9, 2025
Ryan Whitwam (@rwhitwam.bsky.social)
Bluesky Social
Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica. Previous bylines at ExtremeTech, Android Police, Wirecutter, NY Times, PC World, HotHardware, Android Authority, and more. |
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| YouTube will âprotect free expressionâ by pulling back on content moderation - Ars Technica
Jun 9, 2025
YouTube will âprotect free expressionâ by pulling back on content moderation
Ars Technica
YouTube says it is still committed to preventing harm. |
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Jun 9, 2025 |
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Jun 9, 2025
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP WELCOMES AMERICAâS NEWEST CITIZENS đșđžđŠ
YouTube
"My fellow Americans, how exciting this is. Congratulations. Today, you receive one of the most priceless gifts ever granted by human hands. You become a cit... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Jason Bateman, Michelle Obama, and Dems Keep Trying â and Failing â to Insult MAGA, w/Charlie Kirk
YouTube
Megyn Kelly is joined by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, to discuss Jason Bateman insulting President Donald Trump supporters on Nicolle Wallace'... |
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Jun 9, 2025
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP WELCOMES AMERICAâS NEWEST CITIZENS đșđžđŠ
YouTube
"My fellow Americans, how exciting this is. Congratulations. Today, you receive one of the most priceless gifts ever granted by human hands. You become a cit... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Sahara Dust Storm INVADES The US, HILARIOUS VIDEO Shows People STUNNED By Haze Affected Sun
YouTube
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Sign Up For Exclusive Episodes At https://timcast.com/Merch - https://timcast.creator-spring... |
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Jun 9, 2025
Sahara Dust Storm INVADES The US, HILARIOUS VIDEO Shows People STUNNED By Haze Affected Sun
YouTube
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Jun 9, 2025
LA Riots GOING Nationwide, Trump Preps INSURRECTION ACT, CIVIL WAR Or Summer Of Love ft. Julio Rosas
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Jun 9, 2025
President Trump Participates in Invest America Roundtable
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